Service management – more than just IT

IT professionals today have a huge opportunity to become a strategic business partner to their organizations. By extending service management solutions beyond the IT department and across the enterprise, they have the ability to drive process improvements for service requests and delivery, thereby supporting employees in the way they work.

Historically, IT service management solutions were not specifically designed to help employees get their work done more effectively, but as industry best practices for services in IT have been recognized as a better way to provide employee services, today’s service desk doesn’t belong to just IT anymore and is being extended from IT to HR, marketing, facilities, procurement and finance. Today, every employee requests, participates and delivers services as part of their work – no matter the department.

HR – providing an organized approach for employee interaction

From an employee’s first smile to their final farewell, and all of the milestones and vacations in between, service management provides an organized approach for all employee interaction, such as:

• New employee onboarding – with so many steps to employee onboarding, a step-by-step process for outlining the required approvals built in will ease the new employee transition on the company and the new additions.
• Offboarding – corporate security and proper handling of benefits is critical during this time, a detailed process can ensure that collection of all hardware and access to applications is revoked in a timely, yet sensitive, fashion.
• Performance review – whether conducted on a quarterly, bi-annual or annual basis, service management can provide a clear process to the steps managers should take before, after and during the review process.
• Payroll – detailed accuracy is critical for driving an effective payroll process. With HR-based service management, salary updates can be automated along with tasks such as payroll reports and 401(k) contribution changes.

Marketing – providing organization to sales collateral, trade exhibits and corporate content

From trade exhibits to sales collateral, there are numerous activities that must be efficiently managed and orchestrated within marketing. With a detailed service catalog in place, marketing can have visibility into its expanding list of project requests.

• Trade show exhibits and promotional items–trade shows have countless and varying moving parts ranging from creative briefs to the nuts and bolts of the booth set-up. Service management can bring all of these elements together in a logical process, accounting for all of the sales collateral and marketing swag, including the latest presentation, logo design and product demos.
• New web content – to ensure that page updates and broken link fixes are routed to the correct person.
• Email campaigns – managing mass emails to hundreds of recipients that’s both creative and engaging.

Facilities – keeping the lights on with a new level of accountability

Maintenance items quickly accumulate and are easily forgotten. Detailed processes driven by service management solutions create a new level of accountability, resulting in recurring requests to team members to take action on scheduled items in a timely manner.

• Contract management – create a streamlined process for contract review and approval among relevant stakeholders and decision makers.
• Keys and office furniture – develop a better method to track requests and deliveries of furniture and office supplies, which contributes to greater employee productivity and satisfaction.
• Maintenance – timely service of requests is imperative for operations, enforce monthly inspections of air-vents and fire extinguishers to create a safer work environment.

The list of tasks that service management can address in every department in the enterprise is almost endless. But all of these enterprise service catalogs are worthless if they do not work seamlessly together and provide a user experience that matches employees’ expectations. These expectations are new and have been established through constantly improving consumer experiences from mobile applications and web sites. New advances in technology are helping companies to meet these new expectations and for service management to become a cornerstone for delivering ideal services and experience to every employee in the organization.

With a service management solution that provides employees with a one-stop shop for managing all of their workplace requirements – whether it is a new chair, vacation request or executing a new email campaign – we are witnessing more productive, efficient and profitable companies driven by employees who, finally, feel like they are as important as the company’s customers.