Transformation is in the air: Buds of spring are permeating through the frost, the sun is shining on Scotland again, and IT service management is evolving into enterprise service management. 

No longer is automation, data analytics, and technical solutions siloed to the IT teams servicing large and small organisations – entire enterprises are seeing their departments revamped with incoming technology and knowledge bases, updated security protocols, automation and of course, AI. 

But how does a team transform an entire enterprise for the modern age, ensuring smooth onboarding, swift implementation, and overall optimisation?

Kenny Anderson, Senior Business Consultant, CGI, told a packed Dynamic Earth at DIGIT’s ITSX Summit about his on the ground experience of enabling ESM, with dos and don’ts grounded in experience with large organisations such as the University of Strathclyde. 

The first thing Anderson reminded the crowd was that you cannot do ESM by yourself. Support is vital, from existing IT teams, from onboarded agents, and external partners. 

This starts by slowly building a community, split into four steps. 

Building Your ESM Case 

First, identify the team that will be onboarded onto the new ESM system. 

Finding these people, however, is not enough, Anderson recommends that before you even begin to build your business case, you start by winning them over. 

This means going to an organisation, holding a session where the product – and all it can do for an organisation to streamline tasks and save time – is shown off. 

“I’ve had thirty minute sessions run into 90 minute sessions just from people asking questions about what the system can do,” Anderson said. This sparked curiosity identifies and highlights internal pain points in an organisation, which a vendor can use to preemptively tailor their business case. 

“Show them what they don’t have, and what you can do for them,” Anderson said. 

Showing what ESM can do for an organisation will quickly “convert your agents into advocates.”

Examples for organisations, especially for people who “live in their inbox” which presents ESM as a revolutionary tool, ranges from allowing customers to have one point of contact, to tracking analytics to provide insights routed in data rather than inferences. 

Then, you can move onto onboarding. 

Anderson presented this process in three stages: crawl, walk, run. 

Crawl 

Change can be confronting, uncomfortable, and scary – people may remain resistant, hesitant, and overwhelmed. 

Starting at a snail’s pace will allow teams to slowly adopt new tools and processes, and quickly see the benefits, allowing excitement to build as small changes progress to larger transformation. 

“Don’t overburden your team on the first day,” Anderson said. “Start small, and give them very basic solutions to their problems.”

As a team gets to grips with crawling, their workflow will transform, and so will their needs. 

Walk

Once a team has their basics down, it’s time to learn to walk. 

“When a team has matured, it’s time to bring in some analytics, help employees see what they are working on, what their pain points are, and identify common trends,” Anderson said. 

This is where onboarded teams can start to work more closely with the IT team and the ESM vendor in developing solutions and adopting new tools. 

At a walk stage, you can introduce automation and AI as employees identify trends. Organisations can generate a knowledge base, streamline processes, and introduce automation capabilities. 

Now, We Run

Anderson knew that what he said next would make some IT manager’s hair stand, but at this stage, he thinks administrators in an onboarded team should be given access to the sandbox. 

“Don’t let them sink!” he warmed. 

“Let them play with it and they can start to help find solutions, rather than keep bringing you problems.”

This stage is about letting the teams themselves run with their workplace ESM transformation. 

Empowerment and engagement plays dividends, according to Anderson. Enabling employees to develop their own technical vocabulary and abilities can help them identify not just more problems, but more solutions. 

These also create further ESM opportunities, as agents evolve into ESM advocates, ushering in transformation efforts in other departments and organisations. 

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Building an ESM Community 

Throughout his talk Anderson returned to core values of collaboration, listening, and empowerment to truly create not just an ESM system, but an ESM environment. 

In doing so, attitude is everything. Being an IT person is different from non-technical workers. Adapting your language and explaining the why – why a technology is being adopted, why a system is changing – is key to developing a trusting relationship with agents. 

“Stress the fact that every change is for a reason – the reason is to make life easier, and no one can argue with that,” Anderson said. 

For creating an ESM ecosystem, empowering employees through mutuality is vital. 

“The people using the tool need to feel they are able to come to you with pain points,” Anderson said. 

“Only then will they move from agents to advocates.”

Anderson has seen this happen in practice – he’s had administrators join him in sessions just like these to tout the success of their ESM transition. 

This is where building a community comes in; as DIGIT events often offer, the ability to share stories, tips, tricks, challenges and solutions can be vital in enhancing knowledge and bridging gaps. 

Anderson encourages building similar forums within your organisation; having monthly or quarterly sessions with agents about what’s changing and what workers want has allowed for open discussion and ad hoc solution building. 

“It’s about agents taking ownership and really engaging,” Anderson said. “That’s how you get new people on board.”