Service Management
UX Design for Enterprise Service Management
When trying to find a clear definition of Service Management domain, I mostly found abstract statements originated in the ITSM and ITIL worlds. This article contains my own visualization of the domain and lessons learned from Service Management product design practice.
Internal Services
Internal Services such as IT, HR or Travel plays a crucial role in any organization. Other than these large and obvious departments, the whole problem space can be outlined as a colleague collaborating with another colleague towards a common goal. Some of this happens as a part of the core company business, e.g. Data Analyst supporting Consultant during a study, other services are related to company operations, e.g. a colleague requesting to update her profile photo on the company website. I am purposefully not starting with the obvious — IT incidents and requests e.g. “My Laptop is broken” or “I need a new iPhone cable”.
Creative vs. Transactional
Most of the Service Management products have a transactional-based core — a ticket, request, incident or any other entity representing the work. It is very easy to fall into the trap of making the abstract representation of the work a center of the universe.
The primary focus of a Service Management product is collaboration, creativity, and equal thought partnership — as a contrast to establishing a ticket-wall.
A good Service Management product supports users in other tasks beyond firing a bullet. Every creative work environment contains unknowns and with the current trends like Agile and Lean, one of the main challenges of service teams is to be part of the initial goal setup.
To succeed in this mission, service teams must be easily discovered, offer a very low barrier for engagement combined with high availability, and provide creative ways how they can be part of the initial goal setup dialogue — add own context of what is the “job-to-be-done” instead of passively waiting for a detailed request with a fixed deadline.
Service Management as a Platform
One of the main challenges of the product design process is to find the right “Service Design altitude” and related product level of detail. To deploy enterprise software effectively, individual Service Management products are built on top of a platform such as ServiceNow. This eco-system offers a powerful set of out-of-the-box capabilities almost to the level of considering the base workflow to be a solved problem.
The most challenging tradeoffs are related to services integration. In an ideal world, all the services are integrated into a single Services Catalogue. Based on magical personalization, we automatically suggest what is the user goal and offer a consistent workflow for every service team. We often discover, that by levelling up the services altitude, every team is indeed solving a slightly different challenge, coming from a different legacy, and there is a solid business case for many platform customizations.
A single portal website is not the only possible outcome of a successful services integration. Organizational changes such as breaking down the department silos, unified outcome sharing and messaging platform can already provide users with tangible benefits. At the same time, deeper automatization and personalization is only possible when service workflows are consistent and integrated.
Making employees feel satisfied
Service Management tools and enterprise software in general often comes with a significant legacy burden and delusion. The initial perception of internal software being forced and mandatory, thus not providing enough possibilities for a creative competition is not entirely true because…
Does the current Emailing workflow or legacy ticketing system work in terms of being operational? Probably yes.
But how much are employees satisfied with the productivity offered by Excel and Email? Does it make them feel they work on something meaningful? The data are indicating that not so much.
58% of employees wish their work was more meaningful. See here.
It is worth sharpening the design process and continually improve all the enterprise software, including Service Management. It offers many creative challenges for all involved functions — UX Design, Product Management, Technical Architecture or Business process analytics. Our shared goal is not just to replace Excel or other legacy systems — the mission is as challenging as making our colleagues feel satisfied.
