How IT can create innovative service management models that can be applied across the entire enterprise in order to reduce service delivery dispersion.
Gone are the days when the product alone drove sales, we are now immersed in the world of service, where the relationship between the organisation and the customer is an integral part of the product offering.
In a service-oriented (service-centric) business model, the provision of services (monitoring, repair, maintenance, disposal, etc.) supports existing products by further increasing revenues and creates an ongoing relationship with the customer. It is not a one-shot approach, as may be the case with product sales, which is transaction-based.
This foreword is to highlight a truth: companies are service-based organisations. There are two types of services:
The service, therefore, is both part of the purpose of the business and their support. Think of all the services provided by corporate functions such as HR, Facility Management, IT, AFC, whose task is precisely to ensure business continuity.
When we talk about services, we cannot ignore the processes that are necessary to produce them.
Over time and with experience, companies come to define models or patterns, i.e. established procedures that define how to deliver services. For each process, it is indicated, in the presence of certain inputs triggered by triggers, which roles, responsibilities, tools, guidelines, activities and resources are to be provided to produce the required outputs.
Processes are developed according to certain canons (Accountable, Measurable, Trackable e Deliverable) and constantly measured because companies believe that they are the cornerstone of their strategy, as they allow them to quantify the time and investment required to achieve their goals.
There is, however, a point to be made. Processes exist to produce services, but it is the service that delivers a specific result to the customer or stakeholder. We can therefore say that processes are orthogonal to services, i.e. one process may collaborate in the creation of several services and one service may require the activation of several processes. But then why do companies measure processes and not services?
In fact, the organisation's goal is to deliver quality services, which are what the customer wants and pays for. It should therefore measure services, but in practice it is too busy measuring process performance. This leads to a deviation: with process ownership alone, it is unable to relate process efficiency to expected results, which is what the customer really cares about.
The service value chain is much more complex than we think. Typically we are led to think of an internal organisation that triggers processes that produce the business services useful to the end customer
In reality, we have a "web" of services that are produced and consumed. Each department consumes services produced by other departments or external suppliers to produce services that will be consumed by other departments or the end customer.
When these services are externally oriented, companies work a lot on Customer Centricity. For each service, several processes intersect and combine, which are managed by different functions, but with a single purpose: meeting customer expectations.
Let's think of a company in the Energy&Utilies sector: the commercial side takes care of contract definition, AFC takes care of bill reporting, Customer Care handles non-compliant reports... A single service activates different workflows, but the customer has the feeling of talking to a single contact: the Company, the Service Provider. There are no process silos: everything is tracked, measured and improved according to customer satisfaction.
As far as internal customers, i.e. employees, are concerned, the situation that arises is one of entropy. The efficiency of the processes is not related to the quality of the service provided. What happens?
When requesting a service involving several business functions, the employee has to deal with different interfaces to trigger the relevant processes. Let's take an example: an onboarding process may involve several departments, including HR, Facility, AFC. The person involved has to call IT to activate his company account, send an e-mail to AFC with payroll data, hear from HR to benefit from the Welfare programme.
These functions have well structured their processes and use KPIs to measure them, but when there are services that involve combining these processes, the user has to use unstructured communication channels (telephone, mail, etc.). Not being able to track and measure the combination of processes as a whole (the service) does not allow the identification of critical improvement factors.
This situation of internal entropy is then reflected in the delivery of services to the end customer. Think about it, the employee is the first actor in the service delivery processes. What are the consequences?
If the employee wastes time managing his day-to-day operations and organising internally the services that support him in his work, he will have less time available to optimise the outputs related to the processes he is involved in.
If having to juggle multiple interfaces and subjects (the switchboard, e-mails, etc.) does not meet his expectations of the company, his motivation will be lower and this will be reflected in the quality of the services provided.
The need to organise oneself will lead to the wasting of valuable man-hours that could be used in more profitable ways.
It is therefore necessary to provide for Service Management practices that are able to reduce internal dispersion.
IT has led the way in Service Management. Already forty years ago, in response to the need to structure the management of IT services, now an integral part of normal business operations, the first ITIL guidelines were outlined in England.
ITIL, in fact, is a set of best-practices concerning the delivery of IT services. The first versions of this framework were asset-centric, but since 2007 they have been revised to be service-centric.
We are now at version v4, but the evolution does not stop: the framework has continued to adapt to business needs by mapping no longer processes, but individual practices in a value-oriented perspective, culminating in the concept of Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
It is a service management model that applies the principles and technology of IT service management to non-IT contexts (Legal, HR, Marketing, etc.) to add discipline, formalised methodology and automation to the way non-IT departments deliver services to internal customers.
How much more convenient would it be not to request a service using the same kind of self-service portal used to open an IT help desk ticket? And take advantage of IT's already established logic of structuring processes and measuring SLAs? Use cases may vary from company to company, but the contexts in which they can be applied have common denominators:
A decisive role in the universal adoption of ESM was played by certain trends highlighted by recent research::
Over the past two years, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has conducted field research with over 600 IT leaders on the ESM-ITSM relationship: «The use of ITSM people, processes and platforms to support non-IT functions has almost universally positive results» said EMA analyst Valerie O'Connell.
In particular, there are areas in which it is particularly suitable: in legal services management (contract development, legal approvals, consultancy, etc.), in facilities management (equipment supply, approvals, etc.), in Marketing (support for distributed teams with resources and material, etc.) and in HR (onboarding, policy application and communication, holiday and leave approval, etc.).
But in concrete terms, i.e. when it comes to non-IT services, how should business service delivery be structured?
We have said that business service management aims to facilitate the workflows and responsibilities of the various business functions involved. The best way to do this is to rely on a Service Single Point of Contact (SPOC), i.e. a single interface to manage requests and service delivery.
The user no longer has to worry about triggering the individual processes required to produce the service, but simply requests the service and the technology will connect the processes and approvals of the various business functions to produce it.
The advantages can be manifold:
The responsibility for activating the Service Single Point of Contact must lie with IT. Why? The fact that service management best-practices originated within IT service management is not the only reason.
In recent years, companies have computerised their processes within tools (ERP, CRM, etc.) to facilitate faster integration and reading of information. IT is responsible for ensuring the availability and continuity of these systems.
Having said this, we can come to a fundamental conclusion: IT is at the heart of business processes. It has full governance, because all processes - now digitised - go through IT. But at this point, there are two paths open to IT. It can either undergo the digital transformation or lead it.
Mere cost centreor innovator? IT is a function that could be business-critical, that is not only operational but also strategic.
At WEGG, an IT consulting company for which I have overseen several digital transformation projects, we take a specific approach to improving service management in our client companies. There are four areas in which we intervene:
The first step is to measure all critical elements in service delivery with a Service Performance Audit. This document is the starting point for forecasting possible optimisation scenarios and designing ad hoc solutions for a structured handling of requests.
In the course of our analysis, we identify whether there are manual and repetitive processes that are automatable on a large scale with the support of technology (AI and bots). Data collation is also a manual and repetitive process: we also optimise data-mining processes for better decision-making.
We check whether the process measurement systems correlate with the expected results and if not, we provide solutions that make data available by design. We detect inefficiencies and bottlenecks for a functional re-design of processes.
Finally, we work to improve the timing and perceived quality of service by bringing processes to a Single Point of Contact service, which simplifies life for users and drives innovation in the company.
As we mentioned in the last point, the analysis and design phase is followed by a "grounding" of processes on a Service Single Point of Contact. What has been defined between consultant and customer is 'translated' onto a software platform that is easily accessible to end users.
We rely on universally recognised ESM technologies: in fact, we are partners with Ivanti and Easyvista, listed in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Service Management technologies. Ivanti, in particular, is a global leader in automated ESM solutions, with vertically customised modules for individual business functions.
To give you a clearer idea of how a Service Single Point of Contact is structured, I bring you the example of a project we followed closely, which involved the creation of an Employee Self-Service Portal.
The protagonist is a well-known Italian company active in the integrated services sector. It wanted to digitise HR processes for its 28,000 employees in order to simplify the handling of user requests and the delivery of services, which involved other corporate functions.
The aim of the project was not only to dematerialise processes (i.e. eliminate paper), but above all to optimise the time taken to process requests, as the dispersion created led to delays in service delivery and consequently dissatisfaction.
you can see it in operation here.
As experienced digital transformation consultants, we helped the company create a single HR interface where, with a simple connection via PC or telephone, employees could autonomously select the service they required - get their pay slip, severance pay, apply for a scholarship, request sick leave, etc. - and quickly obtain it. - monitor the progress of the request and quickly obtain the service, no longer having to worry about involving other company functions to manage data not strictly related to HR (e.g. payroll).
What were the differentiating elements?
We have incorporated an automation concept
* Article by Francesco Clabot - Professor of IT Service Management at the University of Padua and CTO of WEGG, [email protected] taken from the speech at the Richmond IT Director Forum event organised by Richmond Italia on 15 and 16 November 2021
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