September 20 Release: Welcome to Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
We are excited to announce enhanced support for Enterprise Service Management (ESM), making it easier than ever to take Service Management beyond IT.
For years, many of our customers leveraged SolarWinds Service Desk to help non-IT departments like Facilities, HR, Legal, and Marketing become their own service providers. Every department and its employees are both providers and consumers of services. Someone on the Legal team providing contractual reviews for someone in Sales may need to request a name or address change from Human Resources.
Today, we’re making it easier than ever to do.
Now, customers on the Advanced and Premier plans can leverage our new ESM capabilities to add additional Service Providers and create their own instances of Service Desk.
A Service Provider may often be a distinct department such as HR, Finance, Legal, or Facilities. However, a Service Provider can be any collection of people and the services they provide to others. You may put all your marketing teams into a single instance, or you may have one for the Web team, one for the PR team, and one for the content and design team. The system is flexible to meet the unique needs of your business.
ESM helps standardize service delivery
Many teams and departments face similar challenges when making services available to other teams and employees. These teams will often face the following:
- The lack of a centralized process for effective service delivery
- The absence of formal request processes
- The same questions asked numerous times
- No feedback loop for iterative improvements
- Inconsistent delivery times
- Paying for and using multiple tools to provide services
With ESM, teams who struggle with any of the above can finally find an answer in the same product that’s helped your teams become efficient ITSM providers.
What changes with the introduction of ESM?
ESM slightly alters the experience of SolarWinds Service Desk by introducing the concept of an “organization.” You’ll find some familiar administration objects at the organization level, including users, roles & permissions, domains, email settings, and login policies. Additionally, ESM allows you to create an organization-level service portal, serving as the one-stop-shop and front door to all other service providers and create and manage new service providers.
We’ve built ESM with an explicit roles & permissions model, meaning that administrators must be explicitly assigned to each service provider rather than inheriting permissions from the organization level. This allows administrators to manage the organization without having administrative access to individual service provider back ends, like HR or Legal. This helps ensure sensitive data submitted and managed out of each service provider system is only visible to those who should have access to it.
Each service provider will have access to their unique service desk instance, including their service portal, incident management, service request catalog, and knowledge base. If desired, they can also turn on additional capabilities such as change management, release management, and problem management.
Are you looking to get started with ESM right away? Send a message to our support team, and we’ll work with you to turn ESM on and get started. Get a jump-start and review our documentation .
Not ready, but want to see more? We’ll hold a webcast for ESM on October 11 to review the new functionality and provide a demo. We have three times based on the region and time that works best for you.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. See what else we’re working on.
Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.
