Enterprise service management
Also called: ESM
Applying the discipline of IT service management — catalogue, requests, SLAs, knowledge — to services delivered by any area of the organization.
Enterprise service management (ESM) is the extension of IT service management practices beyond IT: human resources onboarding, facilities requests, legal intake, finance approvals — any area that delivers services through a catalogue, with requests, service levels, knowledge and measurable outcomes. The term is used across analyst firms (Forrester in particular evaluates the space under this name) to describe ITSM platforms that grew into company-wide service platforms.
The evaluation question that separates vendors is how the extension was built. Some ITSM tools bolt non-IT "workspaces" onto a ticketing core designed for IT, which works until a business area needs a process that does not look like a ticket. Platforms built the other way around — a process engine underneath, with ITSM as one implementation on top — extend to enterprise services by configuration, because a service in HR and an incident in IT are, structurally, the same governed object.
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