Enhancing finance with enterprise service management

By Martin Schirmer, President, Enterprise Service Management, IFS

Within a competitive environment, finance teams are in a prime position to become true strategic partners to businesses. But currently only 40% feel most of their work adds value, with a lot of time taken up focusing on day-to-day tasks. As a result, leaders are looking to improve the efficiency of business critical processes, moving away from manual ways of working to automated digital methods.

Enterprise service management (ESM) is the cornerstone of smart digital transformation projects, allowing organisations to enhance key functions and build the foundations of a connected, autonomous business. Over the course of the pandemic, ESM implementation rose to manage remote environments and facilitate complicated processes across a number of devices. Yet for many organisations the technology itself has been too expensive and complex to implement beyond the IT function.

Democratising ESM to ensure it is available to every department – whether it be finance, HR or IT – is vitally important. Not only will it enable organisations to deliver rich, omnichannel customer experiences (CX), but also significantly boost employee experience (EX), improving the low job satisfaction associated with mundane, time-consuming tasks and allowing finance teams to deliver strategic value.

The current picture

Creating a digital finance function is a top priority for the majority of enterprises. While 93% of senior finance leaders are aligned on this vision, change has been challenging. Only 39% said their previous transformation efforts delivered benefits to finance processes – and even less reported tangible benefits to the business.

As a result, finance teams have been slower to digitise core processes. This has meant many are still relying on manual working styles for essential tasks, using emails and spreadsheets to manage workflows. Not only do these jobs take a lot of time to complete, they may be boring and stressful for employees.

Fortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has stimulated the need for transformation. Employee expectations and requirements have evolved irreversibly. Workforces have become more distributed and the overarching move to omnichannel digital-first approaches has meant people now expect simple and instant experiences at work. The pandemic also impacted many finance positions, with managers overseeing more employees than ever before, requiring staff to operate more autonomously.

All of this, coupled with the Great Resignation which has led 40% of finance talent to consider changing roles, has meant many organisations are rethinking current ways of working.

The business case for ESM

Technology allows finance leaders to meet new demands for ease of use, no matter where employees are based. ESM is a fundamental part of the puzzle, playing a key role in enabling businesses to streamline routine tasks for their workforce by giving them the tools to improve service requests and manual business processes across any device.

As an extension of IT service management (ITSM), ESM is a practice that applies the same aspects of ITSM to other parts of the organisation. This includes everything from standard service management principles and theories; to technologies like automation, service desks, incident request and change management software; and self-service capabilities such as knowledge management and chatbots.

By implementing ESM, finance teams can easily monitor the status of service requests, including approving expenses, sending invoices and tracking payments, as well as business resources like people or assets. ESM can also be adapted to ensure it is compliant with each department’s minimum requirements for data privacy. Accounting, for example, needs additional layers of compliance built into the system.

The advantages are significant, helping businesses to boost productivity, enhance visibility and control, increase user satisfaction and understand what existing processes are failing to add value. Not only that, if deployed in other areas of the organisation, ESM can also facilitate better cross-departmental collaboration. For example, it can enable organisations to bring internal services – finance, HR, payroll – into one platform, giving employees a holistic view of the organisation.

Ultimately, happier workers and improved processes mean finance teams are in a better position to help their organisations create a competitive advantage. The key is embracing a new era of innovation, which requires encouraging the workforce to welcome change for the long-term success of the business.

Why we need to democratise ESM

While secure and automated ESM puts omnichannel CX and EX at the heart of finance digital transformation, we need to ensure that it is widely available for departments across the enterprise – not just IT. Crucially, this requires reducing the cost and complexity of implementation.

Looking ahead, we’ll see market disruptors focus on democratising ESM, making sure everyone in an enterprise, regardless of their department, can reap the rewards of effective service management.

This will involve simplifying licensing models and lowering price points. It will also mean reducing the complexity of deployment with the addition of low-code tools, to ensure non-IT workers, such as finance teams, are able to quickly and easily roll out the technology.

With service management and automation, businesses can free up time for employees to focus on more creative, fulfilling tasks that drive real strategic value, while at the same time handling processes more efficiently across every device, so everyone can get what they need, anytime, anywhere.

Those businesses that digitally transform to enhance service management will be in a better position to manage talent across hybrid environments and drive all-important competitive differentiation.