Regain Lost Productivity By Changing the Way People Work Deliver Everything as a Service Across the Enterprise
02 The Service Experience is Everything. As creatures of habit, we gravitate toward products and services that provide consistent and positive experiences. If a customer service experience doesn t meet our expectations, we often go elsewhere without thinking twice. Our professional lives, however, are a different story. Instead of rejecting bad service like we do as consumers, at work we often silently suffer through poor service experiences because we feel powerless to affect change in how we work together. Poor service leads to dissatisfied customers and unhealthy partnerships. It also contributes to corporate decay the continuous decline of workforce productivity created by unnecessary friction between individuals and teams.
03 There is a Solution. And IT Holds the Key. Today s leaders can increase enterprise productivity and improve the service experience by applying fundamental service management structure to business processes. This enables service disciplines to shift the focus from a checklist of singular tasks managed through email, attachments and spreadsheets to one that is centered on a positive service experience. By putting a service-oriented lens on the activities, tasks and processes that make up our day-to-day work life, it is possible to transition into a more productive work environment that is driven by structured workflow.
04 The Modern Enterprise is a Collection of Services. Every workflow involves a request, necessary approvals and fulfillment of that request. This flow contributes to the delivery of something to someone, whether it s focused internally across departments or externally with customers, partners or suppliers. The best way to drive higher productivity is to create a service workflow that crosses departmental boundaries. Requestors get what they need faster and providers automate time-wasting repetitive tasks. By adopting a service orientation to the way people work, enterprises can boost productivity and achieve quick wins.
05 Productivity is Under Attack. A recent study indicates that the average manager spends nearly 15 hours per week on administrative, manual processes. This loss of productivity costs the average enterprise with 5,000 employeeds over 4 million work hours a year the equivalent of 2,000 full-time employees. While the PC changed how individual contributors produced documents, created presentations and sent mail, it didn t change how people engaged with each other to get work done. It simply digitized the stuff that sat on our desks.
06 Recognizing the Challenges to Productivity. The underlying challenge of corporate productivity has little to do with work ethic and has everything to do with how people get work done. Email is sucking the life out of a company s most valuable asset it s people. Employees reflexively use email and file attachments for almost everything. Add instant messaging and micro-blogging to the mix and communication gets even more fragmented and unstructured. These systems cater to one-on-one communication, idea sharing and broadcasting of information, but they don t apply the necessary structure and rigor needed to drive business processes and deliver a service experience that people need to be more productive.
07 Changing the Way People Work is Paramount. Employees are not spending quality time on the strategic aspects of their jobs. Instead, much of a typical workday is spent handling mind-numbing, unproductive, emailaided tasks like submitting forms, requesting status updates, soliciting managerial approval, searching for information and recording and re-entering data. To see what s possible in the enterprise, consider the services consumed outside of work.
08 The Consumer Experience Should Be the Benchmark for the Work Experience. Outside of work, we use cloud-based services to solve our everyday needs, including buying products, booking trips, checking account balances and more. In fact, we re surrounded by entire industries using cloud-based services banking, media, retail, government and education. Services like Uber, OpenTable and Airbnb aren t powered by new technology; they re simply applying existing technology in new ways. Innovative IT leaders are doing just the same by extending IT s service management expertise, knowledge and technology across the enterprise to help teams transform how they serve their customers internally and externally.
09 IT: Proof that Delivering Everything as a Service is Possible. No other department is more proficient at delivering a service than IT; everything IT does exists to serve the enterprise. IT successfully translated a complex web of technology into a set of services that people can understand and easily consume. They took a service-oriented perspective and digitized manual processes for three main reasons: 1 To better serve employees with little technical experience 2 To demonstrate value by aligning technology investments by business objectives 3 To combat cost, speed and quality pressures applied by external service providers At the core of the service fabric is a common service model powered by a system of engagement and automated workflow; this brings much needed structure to service consumption, delivery, assurance and analytics.
10 Leverage Service Management for All Your Critical Business Functions. Every business discipline handles and processes requests from employees, partners and customers, with each group participating in complex service workflows that incorporate input from several departments. Take new hires as an example. Virtually every part of the enterprise HR, Payroll, IT, Compliance, Facilities and Training contributes to a successful employee start date. Other examples of services that drive corporate productivity and cross multiple departments include purchase request fulfillment, disaster response, office moves, creative service requests, new system deployments and many more. At the core, HR, facilities, finance and other departmental service delivery processes are similar to those orchestrated using the IT service model. Requestors have a need; requests are categorized, routed for approval and assigned to the people who can get the work done.
11 How IT Leaders Can Increase Service Efficiency. IT leaders can move all service disciplines into a single system of engagement a workflow-based approach using a service model that applies structure to work, traverses all departmental boundaries and engages the right people at the right time. This will orchestrate real-time interaction and collaboration between multiple service areas to drive participation. Repetitive tasks get completed automatically and at light speed. And IT leaders and their counterparts can use the insights they ve gained to make better decisions.
12 Benefits of Delivering Everything as a Service. For Businesses Elevating the perception of IT as a business enabler and trusted advisor Replacing departmental siloes with service-oriented, highly-collaborative processes that bring together all parts of the enterprise Gaining business productivity insight that drives higher levels of efficiency and innovation Governing with a single, intuitive system of engagement used by everyone Changing the service experience so that people can get what they need to do their jobs better and faster For Employees Work gets done more efficiently, using a single, intuitive system to get what they need Better decision-making is made possible through aggregation of data and information into corporate analytics, which leads to visibility that may not have been present before Creates more self-reliance and satisfaction thanks to better access to help and knowledge of where to get assistance with projects or requests Gives complete visibility into the progress of work, along with a means for providing feedback to optimize processes in the future
13 How to Get Started. A simple, systematic approach proven to transform manual work into automated, service-oriented work: Step 1: Create a Center of Excellence (COE) By focusing on service transformation, you can curb negative perceptions, separating new initiatives from legacy experiences. And for strategic-minded IT organizations, a COE can provide the necessary focus to drive the success of the initiative. Step 2: Assign a Chief Innovation Officer (or Services Officer) to lead the initiative This up-and-coming role is typically matched with an enterprise architect to help define how technology will enable the enterprise service model. Step 3: Idenfity common enterprise services that can be white-boarded If you can whiteboard a process from request to approvals to fulfillment, you can build and automate practically any service in HR, finance, IT, legal, marketing and more. 1 Identify the services you want to automate 2 Outline the current process 3 Select which actions could benefit from being automated
14 How to Get Started. (cont.) Step 4: Design the user experience Think about how people would want to interact with the service. Many times it s easier for the person and the organization to have a portal to request services and check on the status. Organizations can send emails as a notification tool just like e-commerce sites (i.e., Your purchase has just been shipped or Your request has been approved ). All requests would get tracked in the system with up-to-the-minute status updates, eliminating the need for employees to send dozens of emails to check on progress. Employees can go straight to a specific department to find information or submit a request, or they can search all departments through a new, enterprise-wide service portal. It brings a level of consumerized selfservice to work processes. Step 5: Use software to automate and track Service management software turns your whiteboard process into an automated service workflow. Business teams can rapidly create new applications without having to write computer code. With easy-to-use templates, a business user can design a request management and tracking application so the entire organization can leverage a common platform and a common approach to manage services. An automated system gives employees a single point to engage all departments across the enterprise.
15 How to Get Started. (cont.) Step 6: Refine the process Once you ve defined and implemented a service you can measure it to see if you re happy with the results. You can evaluate what the most common tasks are and then identify if some should be removed with better access to Knowledge Management. Step 7: See what else you can automate in the enterprise A survey of ServiceNow users conducted with KPMG showed that HR is the best department to start implementing service management outside of IT. Facilities (23%) and purchasing (13%) came in second and third respectively.
16 IT Leaders: Make Everyone More Productive. You ve already mastered the service transformation for IT. Now it s time to empower the rest of the enterprise to get there too. Visit the Executive Resource Center for more strategies and information on how to change the way people work.