How do you move department requests off email and chat into one system?

Decide which channel becomes the entry point to the system, have the department head announce the switch, and set a date after which the old channels stop accepting requests. Without a date, email and chat keep running in parallel, and some requests still bypass the system.

Which channels to keep

The main entry point is a portal with the department's service catalog: the employee picks a service and fills in a form. The other channels:

• the department's email and chat, only for the transition period, until the cutoff date;
• phone, for urgent issues: the assignee logs a phone request in the system themselves;
• private chats and personal email of staff members don't count as entry points.

The point is one entry point instead of many. At ITG Corporation, employees got a single self-service portal with a catalog of all available services: instead of requests by email, messengers, and phone calls, there is now a single point of entry.

What you can use instead of email and chat is covered in the answer on alternatives to email and chat for internal requests.

What to prepare before the announcement

First, move the department's most frequent requests into the catalog. How to pick them from a month of statistics is covered in the answer on a self-service portal for accounting requests. It's too early to announce the switch while the catalog lacks the usual requests: the employee won't find their service and will go back to email.

Then show people how to work in the system. Run a short demo for each department and show how to:

• create a request;
• track its status;
• communicate with the requester or the assignee.

Post the demo recordings on the intranet so employees can learn from them later.

How to announce the switch

The announcement should come from the department head, not from IT: employees write to a specific accountant or office manager, not to a system. The announcement covers three things:

• what changes for the employee;
• a link to the service catalog on the portal;
• the date after which email and chat no longer accept requests.

Repeat the announcement where people write today: pin it in the department chat and add it to the shared inbox auto-reply. In SimpleOne ESM, a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services, an announcement is published on the portal and sent by email. How this works is described in the SimpleOne ESM documentation.

How to set a cutoff date for the old channel

Name the date in the very first announcement and don't move it: moving it signals that the old channel doesn't really have to go. Until that date, there is a transition period:

• the department still accepts emails, but logs each one in the system and replies to the employee with a link to the service in the catalog;
• approvals that managers still give in a messenger out of habit are also recorded in the system;
• requests that started in email before the announcement are finished there, so the thread isn't lost.

After the date, the department chat becomes an announcements-only channel.

What to do with emails after the cutoff date

• Emails from vendors, customers, and other external parties are not employee requests, so the switch rule doesn't apply to them.
• Two weeks after the date, check who keeps writing by email and talk to those employees in person or through their managers.

How to respond to new emails, and why without that the department's due dates are measured wrong, is covered in the answer on what can go wrong when accounting and facilities join an ITSM system.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. The employee's entry point is the service portal:

• the department's service catalog with forms;
• the knowledge base.

For approvals given in a messenger, there is a dedicated role. An employee with this role records a decision the approver gave through another channel, such as a third-party messenger, and the request keeps their name and the justification in a comment. Details are in the SimpleOne ESM 2.2.0 release notes.

How the portal works is described in the SimpleOne ESM documentation, and how it looks for a department is shown on the SimpleOne ESM page.