Fixing the trust problem holding back ESM adoption
The challenge is cultural, not technical or financial. Three steps can build the organizational trust that makes scaling possible.
At Databricks, HR was drowning in emails from employees looking for support. And it wasn’t the only department at the San Francisco-based data analytics software company that was struggling to deliver timely, quality employee service. Business units operated 10 different service platforms across the company, leaving employees bouncing between siloed systems—or defaulting to email as a last-ditch effort.
The solution? Databricks adopted an enterprise service management (ESM) platform, scaling proven IT service management (ITSM) tools across the organization. ESM provided a unified operating model: one front door for employees, governed workflows across all departments, and shared data to power automation and analytics. Best of all, the single platform let the company smoothly scale up, adding new departments without reinventing the wheel each time.
But the road to successfully rolling out ESM across an organization can be bumpy, largely due to cultural resistance.
“Many companies that try to extend service management beyond IT see their efforts stall because ESM is often treated as ‘rolling out ITSM for HR,’” says Ravi Tharisayi, senior director of product marketing at Freshworks. “The better approach is when other teams see early adopters succeed and start asking, 'When can we get our workspace?’”
On its face, ESM is an easy sell
If building trust were just a numbers game, the business case for ESM would make itself. Recent industry data, analyst reports, and academic research all show that companies that adopt ESM platforms net impressive results:
A recent benchmark study of 10,743 organizations found that non-IT business teams adopting ESM achieved 79.5% first contact resolution rates—outperforming IT teams at 74.1%.
A 2024 paper from Copenhagen School of Business researchers showed that ESM adoption leads to higher organizational efficiency and employee satisfaction.
A Forrester study based on customer interviews and financial analysis revealed that ESM platforms can deliver up to 365% ROI over three years.
Many companies that try to extend service management beyond IT see their efforts stall because ESM is often treated as ‘rolling out ITSM for HR.'
Ravi Tharisayi
Senior Director, Product Marketing
But numbers alone can’t overcome cultural resistance to change. In practice, some business units are hesitant to give up the tools and processes they are most comfortable with, especially when those tools deploy unfamiliar tech like AI co-pilots and chatbots.
“To go to HR and say, ‘We think you should use these ITSM principles,’ they’re going to say, ‘I don’t understand most of those words, let alone when you put them together,’” notes Stephen Mann, principal analyst at ITSM.tools.
Rather than imposing unfamiliar IT tools and concepts on departments, business leaders should start small and notch visible wins, advises Tharisayi. He suggests starting with three concrete steps to establish a foundation of trust across the organization.
How to build trust
Step 1: Start with the right departments. Rather than attempting wide-scale ESM adoption out of the gate, choose the right starting point. That means selecting departments that combine high visibility with manageable complexity, notching early wins that build organizational momentum.
Databricks began its ESM journey with HR, which proved to be an ideal first candidate as it touched every aspect of employee experience, from onboarding to basic policy and benefits questions. Within one month of launching Freshservice’s ESM workflows, HR reduced manual effort by 70%. Automation of ticketing not only generated measurable time savings for HR teams, it delivered faster ticket resolution that was highly visible to the entire organization.
Read also: Uncomplicating employee experience beyond IT
This visibility helped other departments conceptualize how ESM might improve their own service delivery.
“Most business functions have some form of ‘we need to get from A to B, and by getting to B, we achieve C,’” says Mann. “No matter the existing service culture, by showing, not telling, you help them understand that with ESM they can arrive faster at an outcome that satisfies your internal customer.”
Step 2: Integrate governance from the beginning. The most successful ESM rollouts prioritize governance from Day 1. This means establishing clear boundaries between departments, implementing unified data security and access controls, and ensuring that audit trails meet compliance requirements.
The secret is to treat ESM not as an IT initiative, but as a collaborative effort to define clear guardrails while automating processes to meet the department’s needs. Ideally, it will be a dual-track process: While IT sets operational guardrails to ensure data security and compliance integrity, business units will automate workflows and build AI agents to manage support services within those boundaries.
For Databricks, their unified ESM platform gave both HR and IT teams autonomy within a shared framework, with HR maintaining control over data management and analytics, and IT visibility to exercise governance and audit controls without ever touching sensitive HR data.
Step 3: Prove the model with quick wins. The fastest way to build organizational trust is through small, highly visible victories. Organizations that scale ESM successfully focus on symbolic but low-complexity workflows that can be automated quickly while demonstrating the model’s effectiveness.
Case in point: Venture capital firm Sequoia started their ESM rollout with facilities, a business team that struggled to deliver timely support for employee and visitor badges —and no wonder, since they relied on spreadsheets and emails.
With a modernized service platform, facilities went from managing badge requests with back-and-forth email chains to a digital form with few clicks, cutting its turnaround time from two days to four hours. At Sequoia, the CIO leveraged this early success to make the case for rolling out its ESM platform to both finance and legal departments.
It’s a powerful lesson for business leaders as they chart their strategy for scaling ESM across the organization. Yes, getting a lanyard into a new employee’s hand on Day 1 instead of Day 2 is a small win, but it carries symbolic weight. It smooths the path on the first step of the employee journey. At Sequoia, that weighty symbol helped cement a foundation of trust that smoothed the path for scaling ESM across the organization.
