The Barometer has been designed to measure organisations’ progress towards providing internal services in an easy to use or employee-friendly way: for example, enabling self-service access to any process within the business, from financial reports to booking a meeting room or a holiday; essentially providing ‘Everything as a Service.’ Further, it measures how well governed, managed and automated these services are, helping organisations to understand how they can optimise their service investments. Organisations can benchmark their own progress towards Everything as a Service by taking an
online survey.
Based on an independent survey of 400 CIOs in the UK and the USA, the Barometer shows that, despite large investments in service management tools, they are only being used to drive business value in small pockets of the organisation. In the best case scenario, only 21% of organisations can offer all services from departments such as HR, IT, Finance, Facilities and Legal in a self-service manner: despite this being a key element of consumerising the employee service experience. In addition, only 14% of organisations have fully automated service provision and only 23% have a consistent way for users to interact with internal services providers.
“If you look at life as a consumer, almost everything is now delivered to you as a service. If you want to buy something, book an appointment or get some information, you simply click a button. But in the enterprise, you still have to make phone calls, send an email, or push paper around,” said Paul Cash, Managing Partner of Fruition Partners UK.
“The enterprise is years behind providing the experience that employees experience in their lives as consumers. At the heart of the problem is the fact organisations have always thought in terms of what a corporate function should deliver, rather than what an internal user actually wants. This matters not just because employee satisfaction is important, but also because there is the potential to drive significant return on investment (ROI) through delivering services in a joined-up, automated, online way: both through improving efficiency and productivity, and increasing service availability.
“Unless you move to a service based-model, employees and customers alike will soon look at you as an antique at best, or irrelevant at worst. The good news is that organisations have already made the investments in the technology to solve the problem. Now they need to implement it more widely and use it to drive increased profitability and lower costs through 21st century service delivery.”
The data shows the corporate IT function is the furthest towards delivering on the Everything as a Service ideal, with 65% of organisations saying most or all IT services could be accessed in a self-service manner, and 82% saying most or all IT services are documented in a service catalogue or directory. In contrast, the Barometer shows far fewer organisations document and publish services from other business areas, such as marketing (22%), finance (38%), facilities (28%), HR (39%) and Legal (34%). However, the research also shows that CIOs face an uphill battle in helping the rest of the business address this disparity: only 23% of CIOs say that the rest of the business believes it can learn from IT.
“The delivery of IT services inside the enterprise has become much more consumer-like in the last three years. CIOs recognised the need to become service-centric, and have worked out how to deliver what employees want; creating a clear model to follow and adopting the technologies that allow them to meet users’ needs. It’s now time for the rest of the business to learn from IT by using the best practices, service delivery models and technologies that the IT department has already invested in and learnt from,” commented Paul Cash.
Other key findings from the survey were:
- On average, organisations use nine different tools to manage, deliver and provision services, which leads to a disjointed service experience. In fact, the average organisation has spent ?735,332 on these tools on top of their investments in IT service management technology. Taking into account the estimated expenditure required to implement their existing IT service management technology into non-IT functions, the combined waste across all large enterprises in the UK and US is a staggering ?8.15bn.
- Although documenting and understanding business processes is key to providing, managing and governing services, at best only 29% of organisations thoroughly document processes for all core business functions, such as IT, finance, legal, HR, marketing and facilities.
- At best, only 27% of organisations know the service delivery costs for all of the services they currently provide, meaning most have no way of understanding the business value or ROI of these services.
- The use of SLAs, or contracts for service provision to the business, is relatively immature outside of IT; with only 39% of organisations having SLAs in place for finance services, 32% for HR and 24% for facilities, legal and marketing.
“If you fail to put the user at the heart of everything you deliver, you have no way of knowing whether the investments you are making in supporting employees and serving customers are optimised. Making the user the most important factor is how today’s most successful businesses, such as Amazon or Uber, have achieved such high user satisfaction and a sleek operating model,” continued Paul Cash.
“Businesses must understand how people want to work, which is why designing and documenting business processes is so important. They also need to measure services, but cannot do this without SLAs or contracts in place. Further, businesses must use technology in the right way, which the Barometer clearly shows isn’t happening; organisations are overspending on tools, then failing to use them widely enough or implement them in a way that makes users more efficient and effective. Quite simply, the majority of organisations don’t yet have the necessary maturity across business functions to provide Everything as a Service.”
