From Alienation to Amazement with Enterprise Service Management

In my previous blog How to lose employees and alienate them I ironically shared my experience of the three key ingredients to design a poor service experience for your employees. In this blog, I will fulfil the promise I made to twist that story around and instead share with you how to provide an amazing service experience to your employees – namely Enterprise Service Management. 

The last decades of technological advancement created a dependence on available and efficient IT services to run businesses. The principles learnt from that were distilled into what is known as IT Service Management (ITSM), but as you may have read in my colleague Mats’ blog - IT Service Management is dead! Long live Enterprise Service Management! – the reign of ITSM is over. It is now time to apply the principles we learnt within the context of IT, to solve the challenges we have across the enterprise with Enterprise Service Management (ESM).

ESM has the objective of providing a consistent, efficient, and connected end-to-end experience regardless of which support function a service consumer needs to engage with across the enterprise. Meaning, as an employee I only need to go to one place to get all the help and answers I need.

There are two key ingredients to this ESM antidote and they go together like copy and paste (they don’t really work unless you use them together) – the tools (Technology), and ensuring we have an effective foundational structure to extract value from those tools (Target Operating Model).

A Target Operating Model (TOM) is a blueprint or a desired state that outlines how an enterprise intends to operate in the future to achieve its strategic objectives. This is key to success, as technology on its own does not bring about good outcomes, but rather technology is just one aspect of what is needed to deliver a good service experience. For example, there is no use having crystal clear service on your customer service phone, if the agent handling the call is incompetent or impolite.

Our Target Operating Model is split into six different aspects, see below or in this video:

1. Functional Process – how value is delivered.
2. People – who does what, reporting lines, required skills.
3. Service Delivery Model – what will get done and where will the responsibilities lie.
4. Technology – the environments, applications and integrations that enable and automate processes.
5. Performance insights and data – what will be reported and how.
6. Governance – risks and controls for each process, segregation of duties, access rules and policies.

The components we have developed within each of these aspects of the TOM are based on insights gained from working over the last decades with clients all around the globe. It is our approach to set up each of the key aspects for rapid and sustainable functional transformation towards an ESM strategy.

Part of the problem that we discussed in my previous blog is that many organisations build and maintain silos rather than bridges. This is especially evident in the technology space where several disconnected technology solutions are solving just a small proportion of their service consumers’ needs. The result is that as an employee, I have to go to multiple different systems depending on my needs.

The solution to this is to introduce a ‘platform of platforms’ which provides a single point of entry and engagement for your employees. This simplicity provides them with a great experience, which is further enhanced by helpful features such as chatbots, mobile apps and integrations with apps like Teams.

Importantly, we have all the data we need to make the process of delivering their service efficient, but all the complexity is hidden behind the scenes as the platform of platforms is seamlessly connected with all the other tools that are necessary to fulfil the service.

The platform of platforms we have chosen for this is ServiceNow. The reason being, it enables efficiency and automation through a powerful workflow engine. In addition to this, ServiceNow is designed to easily integrate with all other systems that an organisation relies on to operate business processes within their various functions e.g. SAP in Finance and Workday in HR.

So as opposed to our first blog where we discussed how to design a bad experience, by leveraging the right setup of these two important components, TOM and Technology, we now have the ingredients for an amazing experience:

1. Rather than building silos, we are breaking down the silos by introducing a platform that gives employees just one point of entry to get the support they need by integrating and forming the bridge to all the different functions, systems and tools behind the scenes.
2. Rather than designing for the likeminded, we are standardising our organisation towards our consumers, using an insight driven blueprint for sustainable transformation: the KPMG Target Operating Model.
3. Rather than not automating or optimising the processes, we now have a world leading workflow automation tool that comes with the standard processes we need for the key areas of the business, whilst still being flexible enough to allow us to quickly and easily build our company specific workflows as well.

We also practice what we preach and have applied these principles by introducing Enterprise Service Management into our own ways of working here in KPMG Denmark by implementing ServiceNow.

An intuitive service portal provides me with the information and services I need from Marketing, Facilities, People (HR), Quality and Risk Management (yes, that is what QRM stands for) and of course IT.

The outcome for me as an employee is I no longer have to try and navigate the complexity of my organisation, bouncing around between silos and asking my busy colleagues for advice on who to ask. I now have the simplicity that for any service I need from a supporting function, there is only one place I need to go – and all the rest will be sorted out by the right people, behind the scenes.