Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is becoming the operating system of the service economy. Learn why AI-native ESM matters, what to prioritize, and why Serviceware was recognized as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management Platforms (Q4 2025).
We’ve entered the service economy: an era where competitive advantage is created through services, experiences, and measurable outcomes — not products alone. World Bank data shows that services make up a major share of GDP across most economies, which is why “service performance” increasingly becomes “business performance.”
That shift has a practical consequence inside enterprises: nearly every function now operates like a service provider. IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Procurement, Customer Service, and Security all deliver (and consume) services that shape employee experience (EX), customer experience (CX), and bottom-line results.
Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the discipline — enabled through an automation platform — that orchestrates how organizations run enterprise and IT services and service portfolios — aligned across owners, powered by knowledge, governed by design, with the goal for continuous optimization.
When executives talk about growth, resilience, and productivity, they are really talking about services. Here are some extracts on questions line-of-business executives have:
How fast can we onboard, equip, and enable talent?
How quickly can we resolve incidents and prevent repeat outages?
How frictionless are procurement, access management, and approvals?
How transparent are shared service costs — and can we tie them to outcomes
The organizations that win in the service economy are the ones that deliver “low-effort service experiences”: self-service, when possible, fast assisted service when needed, transparent status at every step, and proactive prevention powered by data and automation.
From infrastructure to applications to entire business processes, everything is moving toward consumption-based, service-oriented models. Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud end-user spending to total about $723B in 2025 (up from about $675B in 2024), underscoring how quickly consumption models are becoming the default.
Why it matters: “as-a-service” makes demand variable, costs elastic, and value something that must be proven continuously — not only at budget time.
Practical example (service portfolio + unit economics):
A global enterprise moving from “owning infrastructure” to “consuming platforms” treats platforms as productized services. Here are some examples:
“Data product hosting” with standardized tiers and unit cost transparency
“AI model deployment” with guardrails, approvals, and run-cost visibility
“Employee onboarding” with an orchestrated workflow spanning IT, HR, and Facilities
Idea: Use an ESM platform to establish a comprehensive service catalog to show enterprise services. With a service catalog including services like the above, and a cost model in place, leaders can scale services on demand and allocate, or bill based on real consumption — and they can make trade-offs (speed vs. cost vs. risk) with facts rather than opinions.
Products are often easy to copy. Experiences are not. Gartner’s 2024 Customer Experience Survey is a strong signal: 92% of “CX leader” organizations (those meeting customer needs and outperforming CX metrics) reported revenue increases from FY23 to FY24 — versus 50% of “trailing” organizations.
Why it matters: Experiences are delivered through services — onboarding, incident handling, security response, procurement approvals, facilities requests, knowledge access, and more. That makes service performance measurable, improvable, and strategically important.
Practical example (low-effort experience = fewer escalations — supported by an ESM platform): A “low-effort” service experience combines:
Self-service + high-quality knowledge
Instant status transparency (no “black box” tickets)
Proactive prevention (detect patterns, remove root causes)
Idea: Aim for tangible impact such as fewer repeat contacts, fewer escalations, faster resolutions, and higher satisfaction — which can translate into better retention, higher productivity, and lower cost-to-serve.
Forrester published “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management Platforms, Q4 2025” on November 9, 2025, evaluating 15 significant providers. Serviceware was included for the first time and recognized as a “Strong Performer.”
Serviceware serves over 1,100 customers worldwide across industries, including many of Germany’s largest enterprises. That matters because ESM success at scale depends on enterprise-grade requirements: security, integration, governance, performance, and global rollouts.
Independent benchmarking helps you reduce vendor risk and avoid “feature-checklist” decisions. It sends a strong signal that ESM is about running the enterprise as a coordinated system of services and that there is a global ESM platform market, which supports this cross-functional ESM operating model. ESM needs enterprise scalability, and instead of just focusing on efficiency, an ESM platform becomes the operating model for service quality, experience consistency, and business outcomes.
Deutsche Post DHL creates centralized knowledge at enterprise scale: Deutsche Post DHL consolidated customer service knowledge to provide excellent customer service. With the Serviceware Integrator browser plug-in, over 3,500 agents can access the right content directly inside their daily tools (e.g., Salesforce) without switching systems. The overlay keeps the service app in view while showing relevant knowledge in parallel and can also auto-search MEINWISSEN by reading defined fields.
Takeaway: Knowledge + integration is a force multiplier. It reduces friction for agents and improves response quality — the building blocks of consistent CX — less manual searching, higher efficiency, and improved service quality.
KAERTNER Landeskrankenanstalten-Betriebsgesellschaft (KABEG — five hospitals) shifts from “Excel sprawl” to transparent service costing: KABEG replaced an ever-growing Excel model (over 90 tabs) with centralized IT budgeting and controlling using Serviceware ITFM. The result was a transparent view of services and costs, reliable calculations, and traceable analysis — enabling leaders to explain why a service is more expensive based on clearly listed components.
Takeaway: ESM and ITFM belong together in the service economy. If you cannot explain service costs, you cannot optimize them — and you cannot credibly shift IT from cost center to value engine.
DPD iloxx develops structured knowledge to improve service KPIs: DPD iloxx moved from fragmented knowledge sources to a structured “single point of truth,” digitizing operational manuals and improving onboarding, response quality, AHT, and customer satisfaction.
Takeaway: Speed is not only about automation. It’s also about giving every agent the same reliable answer, fast — across channels.
If you are modernizing ESM (or expanding beyond ITSM), I recommend a pragmatic sequence:
Start with 3–5 high-volume, high-friction services. Examples: onboarding, access requests, workplace services, software requests, security exceptions. My analyst brain says pick services with measurable demand and visible pain.
Define “service units” and measure unit cost and cycle time. If you can’t measure a service, you can’t manage it (sorry, old saying). Unit economics turns conversations from opinions into decisions.
Build self-service and knowledge first — then automate. Self-service without knowledge is frustration. Automation without governance is risk.
Expand across the enterprise with a common platform backbone. Integrate identity, HR systems, finance systems, collaboration tools, and line-of-business applications so services can be delivered end-to-end.
“AI in service management” is not a single feature (there I said it). It’s an operating model that works only when the foundation is right. In successful ESM programs, AI becomes valuable when it is anchored in five capabilities:
A unified service portfolio and catalog: The catalog is where services are defined, standardized, and made measurable. If your “service” cannot be described, requested, and fulfilled consistently, AI will only accelerate inconsistency.
Workflow orchestration across functions (not just ticketing): True ESM connects processes end-to-end: HR + IT + Facilities for onboarding; Security + IT Ops for response; Finance + ITFM for service costing and allocation.
Knowledge as the fuel for automation (and reliable answers): Industry research highlights how much demand could be resolved via documentation. For example, TSIA research suggests that a meaningful portion of tickets could be resolved through documentation and knowledge articles. The takeaway is simple: knowledge management is not “nice to have.” It’s an AI prerequisite.
Analytics tied to outcomes (not only SLAs): SLA compliance is necessary, but not sufficient. Modern ESM measures the things business leaders care about: time-to-enable, cost per service, cost per transaction, deflection rate, repeat incident rate, time-to-value, and the “why” behind demand.
Governance, security, and trust: If you cannot explain why an automation happened — and prove it followed policy — you will not scale AI responsibly. Enterprise readiness means role-based access, auditability, content governance, and integration with identity and data controls.
ESM is how you run the service economy — with AI as an amplifier
The service economy rewards organizations that can deliver consistent, low-effort services at scale — and continuously improve them based on data.
That is why I’m excited about the next era of ESM: not as “a better service desk,” but as a strategic operating model for the enterprise — increasingly AI-native, measurable, and outcome-driven.
👉Learn more on how to use the AI-Native Serviceware Platform for Enterprise Service Management
👉 Download: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management Platforms, Q4 2025 (complimentary copy via Serviceware)