What is Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and why does it matter?

Every department in your organization delivers services, whether it’s HR processing time-off requests, facilities managing office repairs, or legal reviewing contracts. But most teams handle these services in scattered, inconsistent ways through email threads, Slack messages, or spreadsheets that quickly become overwhelming. 

Enterprise service management brings the proven practices IT teams have used for years to every department across your business. It unifies how services are delivered so teams collaborate seamlessly, employees get help faster, and processes work the way they should. 

Keep reading to learn what ESM is, how it works, and why it matters for your organization. 

What is Enterprise Service Management (ESM)?

Enterprise Service Management, often referred to as ESM, is the extension of IT Service Management (ITSM) principles that enable better service delivery for business teams like Human Resources (HR), legal, facilities, marketing, and finance. ITSM is how IT teams manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. 

One example of ESM is building a service desk that could be used by all teams across the organization. ESM builds on IT workflows so they can better manage service demand and delivery with a service management tool.

How does ESM work?

Enterprise service management creates a unified platform where all departments manage requests, automate repetitive tasks, and provide self-service options to employees. Instead of each team building its own processes from scratch, ESM provides a consistent framework that adapts to different department needs.

Three components make this work: 

1. Automation handles routine tasks such as routing requests to the right person, sending approval notifications, and updating ticket statuses, eliminating manual handoffs and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. 

2. Customizable workflows map out each department’s unique processes while maintaining consistency across the organization. For instance, HR uses one workflow for onboarding new employees, and facilities might use their own flow for maintenance requests. 

3. Self-service portals give employees a single place to find answers, submit requests, and track progress. These portals are available anytime and from anywhere. 

The biggest feature of ESM is that departments work through a unified system. For instance, an employee onboarding request from HR automatically triggers tasks for IT to provision accounts and facilities to prepare a workspace. Everyone sees the same information, follows the same steps, and works from the same playbook. 

Why is ESM important?

While other departments, such as HR and facilities, offer internal “services,” they’ve never traditionally applied the structure and frameworks offered in ITSM. ESM emerged from the ITSM space and was largely coined by the leading analyst firm Forrester.

Forrester defines ESM as “extending IT service management capabilities beyond technology services to address business-centric use cases; managing service demand and supply through a common platform, portal, and service catalog; and speeding up innovation and workflow automation through PaaS/low-code development tooling.”

At Atlassian, our customers frequently use Jira Service Management across departments such as marketing, finance, and sales, with great success. Over 100 teams at Twitter, including HR, procurement, and facilities, deliver services such as employee onboarding and incident response in facilities with Jira Service Management. AppDynamics, a provider of application performance monitoring, onboarded over 700 new employees in one year with Jira Service Management. In fact, at Atlassian, we rely on 130 service desks internally to keep work flowing.

ITSM vs ESM: What’s the difference?

Instead of ITSM vs ESM, it’s ITSM plus ESM. A great ITSM implementation helps organizations build upon their success and apply it to unify all teams, standardize service, and streamline workflows. ESM picks the “best of the bunch” from existing ITSM principles that IT teams have relied on for years. 

ITSM excels at helping IT teams improve performance, effectiveness, and responsiveness, and measuring it all is what ITSM does really well. It’s not just about blindly duplicating practices. It’s about intentionally adopting ITSM principles to meet each department's unique business needs. It ensures everyone speaks the same language and can access help in a consistent way.

Certain ITSM practices are a natural fit for enterprise-wide service delivery, including knowledge management. Knowledge management helps team members access information in a self-service fashion. A single, unified portal helps everyone, from assistants to the CEO, access help and direct requests to the right team.

To keep up with the speed of business, ITIL 4 was introduced in February 2019, evolving the popular ITSM framework. Signifying a shift away from inflexible processes and heavy workflows, ITIL 4 embraces ways of working such as agile and DevOps. These approaches focus on flexibility, collaboration, people-centric processes, and speed.

What are the benefits of ESM?

Enterprise service management helps organizations deliver internal services more efficiently and effectively. Teams can collaborate more effectively, respond to requests faster, and eliminate inefficiencies that slow everyone down. The finer aspects of ESM’s benefits are that it: 

Clarifies services and improvements

At a large organization, there is little visibility into the day-to-day work of the HR team for the rest of the company. It’s not always apparent, but all teams offer a range of services that are generally accessed haphazardly. 

HR teams get pings on Slack for payroll information, facilities teams get emailed about urgent repairs, and IT teams get office walk-bys to ask about laptop replacements. ESM helps organizations articulate their services and offer them in a consistent way through a unified portal, accessible 24/7.

Breaks down internal silos

When it comes to onboarding a new employee, HR and IT need to work closely together through a myriad of steps, which can be extremely manual and error-prone. 

With ESM, an orchestrated approach defines a consistent workflow initiating the new employee into the system. Then the facilities team is notified that a new workspace is required, and IT is prompted to organize a new laptop and access. With all the steps automated, a consistent sequence is followed, ensuring no one drops the ball.

Uses automation to drive efficiency

Automating onboarding isn’t the only area that can be sped up. When all teams display their services through a ‘digital catalog’, processes are easily identified and inserted into workflows. IT teams can automate access to software systems or replacements of broken equipment, all while having everything tracked and logged.

Streamline control and governance

What is tracked can be measured. By defining services across all teams, work can be centralized and streamlined. 

For example, ID passes can be risky for an organization. If the requests are lodged through a service management tool, at the end of each month, facilities teams can look at outstanding passes and follow up. Before this, ID passes may never have made it back from contractors.

An example of ESM

To see how ESM works in practice, here's a simple example of what happens when a new marketing manager joins your company:

Without ESM, the hiring manager emails HR. HR emails IT requesting a laptop and software access. Facilities gets a separate message about setting up a desk. Each department works independently, often duplicating effort or missing steps. 

With enterprise service management, you might use Jira Service Management to manage the entire process. HR submits a single request through the service portal, using HRSM templates. This automatically triggers workflows across departments. IT provisions accounts, facilities prepare a workspace, the marketing director receives an onboarding checklist, and payroll is updated. 

Everyone can see exactly where things stand. The hiring manager checks the portal and sees the laptop has been ordered, the workspace is ready, and software access will be configured on day one. The new employee shows up to a fully prepared workspace with all accounts ready and a clear plan for their first week. 

Getting started with ESM

Implementing enterprise service management doesn’t require a complete overhaul. The most successful rollouts start small, prove value quickly, and expand from there. Here’s how to start using ESM:

Create a single portal for all service requests

Employees shouldn’t need to remember which email address goes to facilities, which Slack channel reaches HR, or whether legal prefers intake forms or direct messages. 

A centralized Jira Service Desk is a single front door for all internal requests. Employees visit one URL, describe what they need, and the system routes their requests to the right team automatically.

Design for a customer-centric service experience

Subpar experiences plague internal IT systems. ESM helps define and clarify internal services, creating a holistic approach to processes and workflows that benefit all employees. 

With a central place to find information and request additional support, employees can quickly find answers to frequently asked questions and submit a ticket to the right service team as needed.

For example, HR teams publish answers to their most frequently asked questions regarding payroll, holiday leave, and ID cards. HR can also build and share custom, no-code forms where employees can get clear guidance on how to submit a request and confidence that they will get what they need from the people on the other end of the ticket.

When employees submit a ticket, recommended articles from the knowledge base appear through employee experience management tools, getting employees answers quickly while deflecting tickets from busy teams. 

Implement workflow automation

Instead of HR teams manually chasing down signatures, IT can create a workflow that transitions ownership of the ticket to ensure documents are tracked and fulfilled. Learn more about HR automation best practices.

Start with repetitive, clearly defined processes that involve multiple handoffs, such as equipment provisioning, access requests, and approval workflows. As teams get comfortable, they can start to tackle more complex scenarios like cross-departmental workflows or intelligent routing rules. 

Check out these implementation tips for ESM to get started. 

How to choose the right ESM software for your organization

Selecting enterprise service management software impacts how every department operates for years to come. Evaluate these key factors: 

• Scalability that grows with your organization: Look for solutions that support hundreds of service desks without performance degradation and can easily add new departments as your ESM program expands. 

• Integrations with your existing technology stack: The best enterprise service management software connects seamlessly with tools your teams already use, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, HR systems, and business applications. 

• Ease of use for both employees and administrators: Evaluate the employee-facing portal for intuitive design and how easily non-technical team members can build forms, create workflows, and modify processes without coding. 

• Vendor support and implementation resources: Look for vendors that offer dedicated implementation assistance, comprehensive documentation, active user communities, and responsive technical support. 

• Customization without complexity: The right solution offers flexible configuration through templates, drag-and-drop workflow builders, and customizable forms that don’t require developer resources. 

• Analytics and reporting capabilities: Robust reporting shows service level performance, identifies bottlenecks, tracks employee satisfaction, and demonstrates ROI. Real-time dashboards give teams immediate visibility, while executive reports provide strategic insights. 

The future of ESM

ESM brings clarity to internal services and gets everyone on the same page. As businesses increasingly adopt digital transformation initiatives, IT can be the enabler through introducing ESM. 

IT teams are uniquely placed to drive transformation across the business, and as the experts in ITSM, they can lead the rest of the business to better practices, shedding their previous stigma of being a cost center.

Streamline service delivery across every team

Jira Service Management for ESM gives every team the tools to deliver exceptional service without the complexity. Built on proven ITSM principles but designed for all departments, it brings together help desk software capabilities, workflow automation, and collaborative features that make cross-functional work seamless. 

Teams can create service catalogs tailored to their offerings, build custom request forms without code, and automate repetitive tasks. Built-in reporting and dashboards show exactly how services perform, where bottlenecks occur, and how satisfaction trends over time. 

Whether you’re starting with HRSM or expanding ESM across your organization, Jira Service Management easily scales from a single department to hundreds of service desks. 

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