Business services are a broad category of industries that offer non-financial service to other businesses. They include advertising, marketing, consultation, logistics (including travel and facilities services), waste handling, staffing services, shipping, administration, and security services to name a few.
Many of these services are specialized and focused on a single market segment or customer group. For example, a pet grooming establishment will focus on individual consumers and a company that provides security personnel will target commercial establishments.
While they are not a physical product, business services are essential to the functioning of a company and contribute to economic growth across the world. They are also the most common way for organizations to deliver value to their customers and partners.
The service industry is one of the largest in the EU, contributing 11% of GDP. It is a growing sector due to new technologies that have transformed the industry and increased efficiencies.
As business and consumer needs change, services must evolve to meet those demands. This requires an emphasis on the digitization of processes to improve efficiency, accuracy, and responsiveness.
Steps to Digitalizing Business Services
First, define the use cases for your service. Look for typical transactions that both employees and customers engage in regularly like employee office moves or customer order modification. This will help you to develop a broader definition of your services as well as establish a baseline of data and metrics that you need to measure success.
Next, create a process to manage the incident and request lifecycle for each use case and ensure a repeatable, reliable delivery of the service. This includes a case-based process for both managing the request and responding to the incident in the event of a problem, as well as a knowledge management process for reliably collecting, maintaining, and dispensing the information that is needed throughout the service lifecycle.
After completing the pilot, assign a service owner to each use case and make sure the owner has access to the appropriate ServiceNow capabilities for the purpose of performing their responsibilities. The role should be part-time as you launch the service but may grow to a full-time role as the use cases increase in complexity.
Work with enterprise architecture resources to identify the appropriate integration architecture for each use case. This will require a detailed review of your business requirements and how these use cases interact with other business functions, such as HR, Finance, and IT. Consult our Success Playbook on implementing ServiceNow integrations for additional information.
The goal is to connect the system of engagement and action for your digital business service to the system of insight that delivers value to the organization’s customers, employees, and partners. Then, use the system of insight to build a more informed view of your business that can inform future decisions and enable continuous improvement. Using a common framework of processes and roles is essential to making this possible. This will allow you to scale your business services to support more users and to expand your capabilities over time to a fully enterprise service management function.