When ESM consultants first get started with a new enterprise client, they walk through several foundational considerations before they discuss products or issue a request for proposal (RFP). This helps the consultants determine the scope of the project, the readiness of the organization, and the strategy that will deliver a win.
The process is also highly instructive for the client, or should be, as it often reveals serious issues they will need to address before any implementation begins.
Here are seven questions you should consider before beginning your search for an ESM vendor.
1. What is your current state?
What do you already have that you will need to integrate with your new ESM system? Interoperability is the key to a successful implementation, so take an inventory of all of apps and tools that will be involved. This will become part of your RFP.
2. Where are you in the service management maturity curve?
Organizations fall into three general levels of service management maturity, according to Dennis Drogseth, vice presidency of research consultancy Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Projects that match your maturity level have the best chance for success.
Level 1: You're just getting started
If you're new to ESM, start with a basic non-IT workflow that will support multiple stakeholders. This will give you a measurable improvement over the manual processes currently in place, and your team gains valuable experience that will prepare them for more advanced projects.
Level 2: You have basic service management in a few areas of the organization
If you already have a few successful ESM implementations under your belt, you are ready to get more involved with process automation. Get into a "service-centric mindset, think services, and define services. Then look for a tool to support this, with service modeling integrations," said Michael Pott, senior product marketing manager at Micro Focus.
You might be thinking about adding chatbots—a popular first AI project. But be aware that chatbot implementations require a surprising amount of upfront preparation. "Chatbots can't work without databases full of current knowledge and well-documented business processes," said Pott.
"This can be very discouraging to the new user, who thinks that the automation tool will do most of the work and all they have to do is install it," said Doug Tedder, principal of Tedder Consulting. "Many organizations simply can't adopt AI technology because they are not already managing knowledge."
You must first define a function or process in a way that is repeatable, to make it something that AI can execute. "If you haven't already defined services in terms of business outcomes, then how can you program predictive tech to make the right choice when faced with a set of circumstances?" he said.
If your organization isn't quite ready for chatbots, Tedder suggests starting with a smaller AI project that takes weeks, rather than months, to implement. Show a small incremental value, and continue to build on that in successive projects. In a couple of years, you will have everything in place that you wanted.
Level 3: You already have highly advanced ESM in place
If you are well underway with ESM, consider adding new capabilities and advanced technologies such as:
- Integrations with analytics
- AIOps
- Robotics, including robotic process automation (RPA)
- Workflow automation
Companies with a well-established ESM culture are prepared to use AI capabilities for quite a few things, according to Phyllis Drucker, senior consultant at Linium. "If you have lots of current data at hand already," she said, "upgrading to a tool with AI, machine learning, or predictive analytics is a great next step" for projects such as:
- Powering chatbots
- Decreasing first-level ticket volumes
- Creating knowledge articles automatically
- Automating next steps based on customer or user input
- Predicting risk
3. What are your priorities and project goals?
What is your scope? Your intent? How do you envision service management in your organization? These are the big questions you need to answer before looking for a tool, according to Charles Betz, global DevOps lead at Forrester.
Unfortunately, this may be one of the hardest areas to reach agreement on. According to Linium's Drucker, one of the most common reasons why ESM initiatives fail is an inability to come to agreement on the objectives. Here are the warning signs that your ESM initiative is headed for disaster:
- Inability to agree on the basics: how the technology is to be used and the desired outcome for the effort.
- Analysis paralysis: people getting too deep in the weeds to see the big picture.
- Inability to make a final decision on requirements.
These problems aren't unique to ESM initiatives—they can crop up in different kinds of projects across the entire organization. But they are greatly intensified in automation projects, when people can't even agree on what they want the automation to do or which processes should be automated.
"Imagine trying to use automation to add a record to the configuration management database automatically when there's no governance documenting how an item can and should be added," said Drucker.
The best way to solve this problem is to have the right sponsor and core team for the project. They can use their organizational authority and domain expertise to drive decision-making.
4. What do you really need?
Before you start shopping, see what tools you might already have in the organization. Teams are not always aware of the products others are using.
EMA's Drogseth advised against automatically reaching for the tools that come out on top in analyst reports. "Those reports can help you understand the different options, but you need to consider your priorities and requirements, and choose a tool that has what you actually need," he said.
Think about things like:
- Specific functionality
- Ease of deployment
- Integration readiness
- Integration with service-modeling capabilities
- Stakeholders you will need to support
5. Do you have organizational or cultural factors that could inhibit success?
Departments outside of IT may be resistant to ESM because they do not understand what the technology can do and how they might benefit. Betz has identified two common misperceptions about ESM in non-IT departments:
ESM is really just another name for ITSM. It is owned and governed by IT, so our department's requirements will not be properly understood.
To address this misperception, help stakeholders understand that ESM does not belong to IT. Instead, it is the extension of ITSM principles into more general workloads—solving business problems—rather than managing networks, servers, and password changes.
ESM automations and robotics will ultimately replace the teams that provide services today.
This fear is rooted in a generalized dread of automation, machine learning, and robotics as eventual replacements for human beings in the workforce.
To address this fear, help stakeholders understand that an ESM tool does not provide service. It is simply a unified capture point for people's requests, which can route those requests to the people who can take action on them. ESM won't replace a business user's core systems; it simply replaces the shared mailbox where those requests are sent.
"The proper organizational culture is a vital component of success," EMA's Drogseth said. Where the people providing services are not focused solely on service desk activities, but are aligned with business outcomes and business performance, they tend to be much more progressive about ESM. They are more willing to leverage analytics, and unafraid to "let automation drive an entire process, rather than requiring six levels of approval," he said.
This kind of culture "ultimately starts in the executive suite—usually with the CIO—who defines how people will share data and work together, and determines how flexible people can be, rather than how siloed," said Drogseth.
If you have this kind of culture already, you are well-positioned for success. If you have a less progressive culture, you will need the help of the right sponsor or your project will fail.
6. Who is your sponsor, and how actively will they support ESM?
The number one cause of poor experiences with ESM is a poor adoption strategy, followed by a lack of communication before and throughout the effort, and a lack of backing for the project, according to Linium's Drucker. The project's core team is responsible for developing a solid adoption strategy and proper communication plan. But from the outset, that core team must have the right kind of sponsor who can supply active, visionary, executive-level support for the long haul.
Without the right level of sponsorship, you won’t have cooperation across the different areas of the business. Consultant Tedder said that in small- to mid-size companies, CEOs are the best ESM project sponsors. For global enterprises, the CIO and CMO often jointly sponsor such projects. "This seems to be a naturally evolving partnership that works well," said Tedder.
You need the C-Suite backing you up because they're the ones responsible for overall business performance. The right sponsor has the power to act decisively as well as to resolve any conflicts and cultural issues. They'll make sure that ESM becomes a long-term effort that continues to add value to the business.
7. Can you build the right kind of team?
To succeed, you need a mix of executive leadership, process and political alignment, and strong mid-level management teams—architects, site reliability engineers (SREs), and DevOps and analytics specialists. "You need a truly strategic initiative, with a team defined to own that strategy," said EMA's Drogseth. "They will get direction, leadership, and air cover from the executive sponsor, but the day-to-day work will fall to them." In some places, they call this the automation center of excellence.
Vesna Soraic, senior product marketing manager at Micro Focus, said that ESM presents an organizational change and management opportunity that is vital to long-term success. In her opinion, ESM must be supported by a cross-functional team that is engaged for the long haul.
"Be sure IT has a seat at the table. Since IT has the most experience with automated service processes, they should participate as a trusted advisor on the team. All other departments in the enterprise need IT's help to get more advanced in this area," said Soraic.
The team must be willing to take a staged approach to implementation that can evolve based on priorities, according to EMA's Drogseth. And they must be prepared for a long, sustained effort that does not result in a project launch with a single before-and-after state, but rather multiple projects that create a stepladder to where you're trying to go.
Build a list of viable options
Once you have worked through these questions, you should have a good idea what kind of project your organization is ready to tackle, and, within a few months, have found one that can deliver measurable business value.
Now you are ready to look for tools that will support that project. Use these five key selection criteria to find products and vendors that fit your requirements, and build a list of products to evaluate.
5 key selection criteria
Here are five selection criteria consultants and other experts consider to be most important when evaluating ESM products.
1. Does it have the most important core features?
"To be in the Forrester Wave they have to have all these things," said Forrester's Betz. In his opinion, you should not seriously consider options that don't have:
- Basic workflow engine
- Configuration management database asset registry
- Incident and change management
- General request management
- Service portal
- Modules that fit your requirements
For detailed recommendations about how to map ESM vendors to your priorities and requirements, check out Forrester's Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Buying Guide, 2020.
2. Was it designed to do what I need it to do?
The tool you purchase should be built for the types of use cases you have. A tool that wasn't designed for your use cases isn’t a good match, no matter how well it's rated in other areas.
Forrester's Betz said that sometimes people are disappointed with an industry-leading tool that was recommended in the Forrester Wave, and they complain to the research firm. "After a short discussion, 90% of the time the customer will admit that they tried to get the tool to do something that it wasn’t designed to do," he said.
"They say, 'Well, our consultant told us not to do it, a field engineer told us not to do it, but we had to customize the tool in a certain way to fit our business process. And it just didn’t work!'"
That's the biggest mistake you can make with ESM technology, according to Betz, because non-standard processes fly in the face of the industry best practices that are built into the tools.
"All of the products in the Wave are battle-hardened and have had to deliver very high-visibility workloads in production, sometimes for decades," he said. The designers of these tools study hundreds of successful processes and design everything around processes that have business consensus.
"Unless you have tons of value riding on that nonstandard process, and it's a competitive differentiator, you should fix your business process to work the way the tool is designed," said Betz.
3. Will it interoperate easily with my existing environment?
Interoperability is the most important selection criteria when choosing among vendor offerings that have all the basic features you need. In general, look for vendors that use web services and open APIs that make it easy for different tools to share data.
You'll want to integrate ESM with your DevOps toolchain and all your existing ITSM and ESM tools. Some vendors offer a pre-published set of APIs for the most popular platforms. At a minimum, you want an integration guide. (For specific guidance on how to ask about interoperability, see How to create your RFP.)
4. Which vendors fit the scope of my operations?
Scope of operations is one of the biggest differentiators among products, according to Forrester's Betz. Look for tools that fit the size of your organization and that can support the scale of workloads for which you expect to use them. For guidance about how to consider requirements based on organization size, take a look at Forrester's Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Buying Guide, 2020.
5. What else can the vendor do?
Think about the vendor's offerings holistically. "This is a significant and very valid point of comparison when deciding on a vendor," said Betz. For example, you might find a tool that is in the middle of the pack in the Forrester Wave for ESM, but it has a strong endpoint management capability. "If you need device management as well as service management, they"d be a better choice for you than others who may have scored better on pure ESM capabilities,” said Betz.
Key takeaways
- Take the time, before you start to seriously consider specific products, to step through the seven questions above to help determine the scope of the project, the readiness of your organization, and the strategy that will deliver a win.
- Another important benefit of this approach: It often reveals serious issues that you will need to address before implementation begins.
- Make sure you have the correct sponsor and right team, and honestly assess your ESM maturity level. Cultural issues are key to success.
- Remember that the tools you already have will need to integrate with whatever new ones you consider. Also consider ease of deployment.
- Keep in mind our five important selection criteria: Core features, and make sure you understand the use cases a tool was designed to help. Force-fitting that tool into a situation it wasn't designed for can just about guarantee a failure.
Read next: How to create your RFP. We offer detailed guidance to help you create a request for proposal (RFP) you can use to invite the ESM vendors on your list to compete for your business.
