Again, this all is on condition that you’re already doing the right things and have your service management act together. If, however, the approach to change comes from trusted colleagues, and if it is clearly an offer to share knowledge and tools, the reaction will very likely be different. Consider what happens if someone announces that they are going to “fix” how your work gets done raised eyebrows and eye rolls ensue.
One way to virtually guarantee high resistance is to begin by conveying that you know how to do things better than someone who is already doing it. Overcoming resistance to change is a major part of any organizational change management. It is about enabling other parts of your business. It is about enabling other parts of your business to do things in better ways, with better data, better processes, and in many cases, better tools than they currently have. One of the ways the shift to ESM can be hobbled from the start is making it seem as if IT is telling the rest of the business units how to do their jobs. Our past research has shown that IT is leading ESM efforts in more than half of organizations. (We’ll discuss more about how important it is for IT to have its own house in order in the next post in this series.) Showing leadership is not the same as saying, “Do it our way.” What this is all about, then, is improving business outcomes, not putting a feather in IT’s cap, or following a trend. The use of ITSM principles and capabilities in other areas… to improve performance and service. Our favorite definition of ESM comes from analyst Stephen Mann: Before we launch into more of how to expand service management, let’s follow Simon Sinek’s sage advice and start with why. Now we’ll begin to focus in on what’s necessary to make the changes work in practice. In the previous post in this series, we discussed the cultural changes that are necessary to successfully achieve successful ESM. Enterprise service management (ESM) done right can be a large step on the journey of digital transformation-the term used to describe the fundamental shift to new ways of doing things.