Rohan Joshi is the CEO and co-founder of Wolken Software, which provides customer service and ESM solutions through AI-backed technologies.
A global B2B company can close a multimillion-dollar deal and still wait weeks or months to realize the revenue. The contract is signed, but if legal, finance, security, IT and customer operations cannot coordinate the work required to launch the account, that revenue stays trapped inside the organization.
Every department is working inside its own process, but no one owns the end-to-end commitment. It often falls to the customer operations team to resolve the issue, but they rarely have visibility into the operations of other departments. This makes it difficult for them to identify the blockers delaying a launch.
Enterprise service management (ESM) creates a holistic structure to coordinate workflows, ownership and service delivery across departmental boundaries.
ESM is often treated as an IT or infrastructure function. But its real value isn’t as a back-end integration layer. ESM has significant revenue implications, as it can shorten the distance between winning contracts and actually generating revenue and helps limit the growth of administrative complexity.
That makes ESM relevant to the entire C-suite, not just IT departments.
Resilience is an operating problem before it is a technology problem.
Most executives already treat resilience as a board-level concern. In fact, 86% of business leaders say their boards have increased activity around monitoring risk, overseeing growth strategies and strengthening long-term resilience.
Resilience is most frequently discussed in terms of uptime, disaster recovery and cybersecurity, which is where the language of risk comes from. But in complex B2B organizations, a customer commitment can also fail while every individual team meets its own target, because ownership, handoffs and dependencies were never clearly defined across the seam.
It’s no surprise that two-thirds of leaders believe their organizations are overly complex and inefficient. The challenge is that complexity scales fast. Companies must prioritize cross-functional coordination as they scale, and that starts with building a coordinated service layer across the organization.
When building that layer, three areas should be addressed first:
1. Visibility shows which revenue is at risk.
A shared service model makes work visible as it moves between functions: where a request originated, who owns it now, what it is waiting on and which customer commitment is exposed if it stalls. Most organizations find out too late.
Oxford Economics found that 47% of technology leaders said customers are often the first to detect service degradation or outages. This is happening within the IT department, where monitoring is most mature. Departments with less sophisticated monitoring processes have greater potential for visibility breakdowns that can occur across cross-functional processes. Visibility gaps can arise across business functions, and can arise when customer operations cannot see what is holding up a launch and delaying new revenue.
When leadership’s operational picture is assembled from a dozen departmental dashboards, no one sees the pattern until a customer reports it. Adding separate service desks in HR, finance and other departments may produce better departmental reporting but lacks a full enterprise view. The value comes from seeing a request cross a boundary, because that is where the delay most frequently lives.
2. Coordinated response determines how long a disruption lasts.
Downtime costs Global 2000 companies $600 billion a year, up 50% in two years, with an average of $95 million in lost revenue per organization. These figures capture the financial cost of an outage but there are additional significant ramifications beyond loss of revenue. Organizations often react by utilizing significant resources to address this one issue while other commitments quietly slip through the cracks.
Standardized intake, routing and escalation can help reduce that lag directly. When work reaches the right people with the relevant history, urgency and business context attached, issues get prioritized by business impact and escalation becomes less reliant on informal coordination between departments.
3. Operational knowledge should be an enterprise asset, not a personal one.
Many organizations run on knowledge that lives with a handful of employees. In most complex organizations, the real escalation path is informal, and it works right up until the person who held it together leaves. Turnover is a real risk too: Repetitive, low-value work erodes engagement and drives people out.
Documented workflows and consistent service data turn that into something the enterprise owns. The practical payoff is continuity: knowledge that survives turnover, reorganization, geographic expansion and acquisitions. Getting the underlying knowledge base right is its own discipline, and a prerequisite rather than an afterthought.
It also creates the only sound foundation for automation. Forrester’s research on ESM platforms notes that AI is now the primary investment area in this market, and the appetite is understandable. But companies often struggle when they automate the wrong areas of their business, and cross-functional workflows are where that mistake gets expensive. Standardize the work first, then automate the parts that repeat.
Close the gap.
Many organizations choose to treat ESM as a procurement exercise. That is the wrong starting point. Gartner recommends assessing digital friction and executive interest when evaluating ESM’s value. The first question isn’t which tool to buy, but where work gets stuck between teams.
McKinsey found that 84% of global business-services leaders say that they are planning to expand the scope of their shared services within the next two years. Yet more than 40% of them shared that their company has not started to systematically adopt advanced technologies.
In developing a strategic ESM implementation plan, executives should begin with three steps:
Start with a customer commitment, not a department. Map the functions, approvals and handoffs required to deliver one priority business outcome, end to end. The breakdowns will become obvious.
Define shared measures. Focus on KPIs like time to issue resolution, cost of delays or revenue at risk. Avoid departmental metrics.
Own the governance. Technology enables the operating model, but only executives can align ownership, incentives and accountability across functions. That work does not delegate.
Complex organizations cannot eliminate disruption. What they can control is how quickly it is seen, understood and resolved. Business resilience is not the absence of disruption. It is the ability to coordinate the enterprise when disruption arrives.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?