Role of Enterprise Service Management to Develop Crisis Resistant Enterprises in the COVID-19 World

With the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises have witnessed drastic changes while engaging with clients compelling them to drive a new era of employee and customer experiences across industries. Enterprises are transitioning to cloud-led service management platforms to deliver the right solution or information at the right time to employees and customers so that they can efficiently perform their tasks without any hindrances.

While the pandemic has wreaked havoc for many enterprises, businesses like ServiceNow, Netflix, and various IT service providers have fared well due to low dependency on physical interactions between customers/employees and on-premise infrastructure. They use virtual and cloud technologies for device provisioning, collaborations, and user experience management.

Growing expectations about IT becoming a strategic business driver

With a shift of focus from reactive IT Service Management towards proactive IT operations management that emphasizes outage prevention, many organizations now consider IT a strategic partner for end-to-end business transformation. Transforming service management to elevate service experience has a new meaning and is made possible by choosing the right cloud platform.

ServiceNow is an example of such a platform with a configuration management database (CMDB) aligned with the common services data model. CMDB is leveraged by various business functions like IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, Human Resource, Security Operations, etc. Thus, Enterprise Service Management (ESM) not just addresses the traditional areas of IT, but it offers an end-to-end suite for transforming service management across the entire enterprise.

Cloud Adoption

The last decade has witnessed rapid adoption of cloud technologies like Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). As remote work and collaboration intensify, organizations are racing to adopt a cloud-first strategy to build a secure virtual workplace.  Following are the key reasons why businesses need to move to the cloud:

• Scalability: Pay only for what you use, thus reducing infrastructure spend. Cloud systems bring in agility by enabling dynamic changes in attributes like storage size, RAM, and processing power as per business requirements.

• Flexibility: Cloud services enable users to access resources from anywhere using any device such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. Provisioning of cloud resources becomes convenient as it is provisioned to the users immediately via self-service catalogs.

• Reliability: Organizations move to the cloud to ensure business continuity even during rare or unprecedented situations like a pandemic, flood, or global technology outages. Cloud services offered by most of the top cloud service providers usually have near-zero downtime, thus ensuring high availability and minimizing adverse impact to the business.

• Security: Cloud platforms have advanced security protocols that are very difficult to breach. Cloud providers usually offer cloud encryption services for enhanced data security since it assures that only authorized users have access to sensitive data.

How Enterprise Service Management can be a differentiator?

Author: Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, EVP, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions and Infosys Validation Solutions

The scalability, flexibility, reliability, and security offered by cloud services can be maximized by the presence of a single system of action that leverages a common data model used by the various functions of an enterprise. ServiceNow is an example of a platform that acts as a single system of action.

Following are some of the salient features of a world-class Enterprise Service Management platform must entail:

• Common data model: A unified configuration management database (CMDB) that tracks and maintains the data and relationships between all infrastructure components (i.e., configuration items) present in the organization. Enterprises must create a guidance framework to ensure consistent data modeling of these configuration items and business services.

• Beyond IT Service Management: Enterprise Service Management can be used across all IT functions. When it comes to core IT service management, the platform should have capabilities for end-to-end management of incidents, problems, changes, and end-user service requests in the presence of a unified knowledge base. The ESM tool can gather meaningful insights from several events, identify anomalies to prevent outages, automate event remediation, manage cloud governance, and optimize compliance and cost with efficient IT asset management.

• Single Platform – Multiple Consumers: A world-class Enterprise Service Management tool can be utilized by employees, business users, and customers across non-IT areas like customer service management, security operations, human resources management, and risk and compliance management.

• Custom Applications: Additional features like the Now platform, which enables building no or low code custom applications are very useful in creating new apps. For example, several COVID emergency response apps were developed on ServiceNow’s Now Platform.

Thus, a modern enterprise service management system is poised to be versatile enough to transform an organization’s end-to-end business functions while ensuring a competitive advantage.