What can go wrong when you bring accounting and facilities onto your ITSM tool?

Bringing accounting and facilities onto an IT service management (ITSM) system most often stalls because of internal agreements: administering the department's services quietly lands on the IT team, the services have no owner in the department itself, and accounting is not sure who will see its data. You remove these risks by assigning roles and permissions before launch, and you decide on the next departments based on a pilot in one department.

Will administering other departments' services land on IT?

It will, if the boundary is not drawn in advance: then every new field in an accounting form becomes a task for IT. The department owns its services and due dates, and IT owns the platform. How to split the roles is covered in the answer "Can accounting and facilities use the ITSM system we already have?". The initial setup of the department's services is done by an implementation partner or the company's own team.

That is how it went at ITG Corporation: the project was delivered with integrator ITGLOBAL.COM, part of the group, and the platform's low-code tools let the team build the applications it needed and customize processes without vendor involvement.

Who owns a department's service and its due dates

Not IT. Each service needs an owner from the department itself: they decide what information the employee must provide, who does the work, and what due date the department commits to. If IT sets the due dates, IT will also be blamed when accounting misses them. Assign owners in a policy or procedure before launch, not after the first complaints.

How to separate access to accounting data

Assignees from other departments and IT specialists should not see invoices, reconciliation statements, or income verification letters unless they need to. Decide before launch who sees the department's requests, who works on them, and who only approves.

What to do if employees keep using email

While the old channel stays open, some requests bypass the system, and the department's due dates are calculated incorrectly. Set a date after which the department accepts requests only through the portal and replies to emails with a link to the service in the catalog.

How not to take a personal risk: a pilot with criteria

An IT leader takes a risk by promising results across the whole company at once. It is safer to agree with leadership on a pilot in one department: name the timeframe and the numbers that will decide whether to go further in advance. For example:

• the share of requests coming through the portal;
• due date compliance;
• assignee workload.

Then the decision about the next department is made based on the pilot's numbers. Departments can be connected one after another.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. On the shared portal, each department has:

• its own service catalog;
• its own assignees with automatic task assignment;
• approvals and service level agreements with due date tracking.

Access to tables and records is restricted with access control lists (ACLs) and roles, and access to objects with conditions based on the user's role, group, or department. How to set this up is described in the SimpleOne platform documentation.

Pilot results are visible in traffic light scorecards, where department and employee performance is assessed against metrics. If the company already runs SimpleOne ITSM, the department is connected to the same instance.

What it takes to connect a department is covered in the answer "Can accounting and facilities use the ITSM system we already have?", and which department to take first in the answer "Which department should you start with when expanding service management beyond IT?". What a department portal looks like is on the SimpleOne ESM page.