IT Service Management for Employee Experience: Game-changer or gimmick? 

Introduction

1.1. The curious state of the digital employee experience

Over the past decade, enterprises worldwide have come to appreciate that a great digital employee experience (DEX) is fundamental to organizational success. Today’s workforce no longer merely expects to use digital tools; it demands coherent, intuitive, and human-centered experiences that mirror the convenience and personalization of consumer-grade applications. This evolution has propelled the concept of the intranet into a new realm, where a holistic Employee Experience Platform (EXP) takes center stage as the heartbeat of collaboration, innovation, and productivity.

However, there remains significant confusion in the market about what truly constitutes an EXP. The lines have blurred as solutions originally designed for other specialized tasks begin to market themselves as the heart of the digital workplace. In particular, IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms—lauded for their robust capabilities in ticketing, service desks, and workflow automation—often position themselves as end-to-end solutions for the employee experience. But do these offerings truly serve as a holistic, enterprise-wide solution for every aspect of the DEX, or is it merely a form of “lip service” to the broader goals of employee engagement, corporate culture, and integrated collaboration?

In this guide, we aim to explore the intersection of ITSM and modern Employee Experience Platforms. Drawing on over 20 years of industry expertise, we’ll shed light on both the immense value of ITSM solutions and their inherent limitations when it comes to creating a unified employee experience. We will highlight the unique advantages of adopting an EXP to serve as the foundation of the digital workplace - one that navigates myriad enterprise applications (including ITSM) and curates an experience that meets employees where they are in their day-to-day workflow.

1.2 ITSMs and EXPs: Why this conversation matters

The conversation surrounding ITSM and EXPs is particularly crucial for CIOs, CTOs, Heads of IT, Heads of Digital Transformation, and other senior IT leaders. These professionals are often tasked with collating a technology estate that aligns with the business’s goals, and making sure that major investments in tech truly drive ROI. Historically, they have a relationship with ITSM solutions for managing incidents, service requests, asset control, and more. Over time, these solutions have evolved in ways that appear to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of IT. But do these changes truly extend to delivering a complete digital experience that engages, informs, and empowers the entire workforce?

The stakes are high for enterprises making significant investments in their digital workplace. The digital employee experience can profoundly impact employee productivity, engagement, retention, and ultimately, organizational success. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce 2024 Report, organizations with highly engaged employees experience productivity that is between 14-18% higher than those with poor engagement scores. At the same time, confusion over the proper role of ITSM can lead to fragmented adoption, duplicated effort, and wasted resources.

In this paper, we will:

• Clarify how ITSM and EXPs differ in purpose, scope, and outcomes.
• Highlight the need for a unifying platform that streamlines and personalizes the employee journey.
• Illustrate how ITSM solutions excel at what they do—managing tickets, automating workflows, and delivering critical IT services—yet cannot single-handedly fulfil every dimension of a robust digital workplace strategy.
• Offer insights into how an EXP, such as the one provided by Unily, can act as the orchestrator of IT services and everything else employees need to thrive.

By the end of this guide, you will see how ITSM solutions and Employee Experience Platforms can coexist as complementary technologies, each playing to their unique strengths. More importantly, you will walk away with a clearer strategic framework for positioning an EXP as the heart of the digital workplace, ensuring that every service - from IT to HR to Corporate Communications - is seamlessly and intelligently integrated.

2. ITSMs in the context of Digital Employee Experience

2.1 The value of ITSM: Usage, adoption and market projections

At its core, IT Service Management (ITSM) focuses on how organizations manage and deliver IT services to internal users. The fundamental capabilities include:

• Incident management – Logging, categorizing, and resolving tickets raised by employees.
• Request fulfillment – Handling requests for services, applications, or equipment.
• Problem management – Investigating root causes and preventing recurring issues.
• Change management – Ensuring standardized methods for handling alterations to the IT environment.

Over the years, ITSM platforms have evolved to incorporate workflow automation, self-service portals, knowledge bases, and performance analytics. They excel in use cases that require:

1. Structured processes: Standardizing the way tickets and requests are raised, tracked, and resolved.
2. Workflow management: Automating repetitive tasks, escalating issues automatically, and streamlining service delivery.
3. Compliance and auditing: Maintaining an auditable record of issues, actions, and solutions.

Market data

According to a number of sources, the global ITSM reached a value of $10.5bn in 2023, with a 2023-2027 CAGR of approximately 10.8%. This robust growth underscores the value enterprises place on tools that efficiently manage the IT environment. In fact, Gartner has frequently highlighted how mature ITSM practices improve IT cost optimization, reduce downtime, and enhance internal customer satisfaction.

Such evidence supports the argument that ITSM tools are a critical component of the modern IT stack. Organizations need a reliable, repeatable system for delivering technology services - particularly in large, decentralized enterprises.

2.2 Common limitations of ITSM tools

However, the Digital Employee Experience is about far more than structured processes and ticket resolution. Ultimately, it’s about people. While ITSM helps ensure that employees have the right tools and services, at the right time, it does not necessarily engage them at a holistic level, or help to align them with the wider company purpose. Here are some typical limitations when ITSM tools are shoehorned into broader digital experience strategies:

1. Narrow focus on IT services
   The primary function of an ITSM platform is to handle IT-related concerns - incident management, request fulfillment, and asset management. While modern solutions have become more extensible, they are still built around the central premise of managing IT tickets and workflows. When organizations rely on ITSM as the central hub of the digital employee experience, they risk neglecting non-IT areas such as corporate communications, HR services, collaboration spaces, and knowledge-sharing initiatives that transcend departmental silos.
2. Lack of “human” engagement features
   A robust digital employee experience often requires engaging content, social features, community building, and personalization. These elements are not the strong suit of most ITSM platforms. While a self-service portal might offer knowledge articles or chatbots, that does not necessarily translate into the kind of two-way interaction, content discovery, and cultural engagement that fosters a sense of connection and belonging among employees.
3. Limited versatility and integration
   ITSM tools are generally best of breed for IT processes. However, large enterprises rely on dozens - sometimes hundreds - of other applications for HR, finance, marketing, and more. Without a unifying platform to tie these tools together, employees often face a fragmented experience, toggling between multiple interfaces and systems just to complete everyday tasks. This can lead to "app fatigue," where employees become less productive due to constant context-switching.
4. Risk of over-engineering workflows
   ITSM often shines in automating structured workflows - making it easy to fall into the trap of seeing every process or interaction through the lens of a “ticket” or “workflow.” While workflows are critical in many scenarios, not every employee interaction or piece of communication fits into a rigid, step-by-step process. Valuable innovations, idea-sharing, and spontaneous collaboration can be stifled if the digital workplace is reduced to checklists and forms.

From these observations, we see that ITSM solutions, while invaluable, are simply not designed to serve as the comprehensive front door to the digital workplace. The next section of this paper explores the concept of an Employee Experience Platform - something that sits above and beyond discrete IT functions to unify the digital workplace under a single, cohesive experience.

2.3 IT bottlenecks and Total Cost of Ownership

Given the nature of the tasks that they were originally built to do, it is clear that ITSMs must, on a day-to-day basis, be managed and maintained by IT teams.

ITSMs are simply not built for non-technical back-end admins. This is fine if IT are the only stakeholder in EX, but successful EX strategies need to involve a broad array of stakeholders across HR, Internal Comms, and IT. As such, no-code, intuitive and templated back-end experiences are vital to enable cross-departmental collaboration and an EX strategy which is not limited by IT or resource bottlenecks.

In this way, a purpose-build EX solution with great user experience is always best. Not only does it foster cross-functional collaboration, but it also helps the organization to do more, with less. Leading EX platforms can be managed effortlessly by only a small, core team of non-technical stakeholders, essentially freeing up resource for other business-critical activities. For those after some statistics, Nielsen Norman publishes insights around the resources required to manage a successful intranet/ EX. 

2.4. Why are ITSMs entering the EX market?

ITSMs have obvious strengths and deliver known value in the context they were built for – yet they have key gaps in EX functionality. This leads to an important question: why are ITSMs now seeking to enter the EX market? In fact, there’s a growing trend for so-called "megavendors" to enter the EX space, with either standalone solutions consisting of repurposed functionality, or via acquisition.

The most likely answer has been signposted by Gartner in their recent Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions; it is intended to “reinforce [the vendor’s] overall portfolio.” In other words, ITSMs have entered into the EX space because it makes existing customers even more invested in the suite, and consequently, breaking away to other vendors becomes more difficult.

Using some of an ITSM’s functionality to deliver a (limited) EX solution therefore further ties customers into their ITSM vendor. Of course, senior IT stakeholders spend considerable time weighing up their organization’s IT estate in terms of whether it meets needs, delivers value, and mitigates risk. In this context, IT leaders may wish to consider the following:

1. Is the business happy to go ‘all in’ on a specific vendor across the IT estate, including adding to the complexities of contract renegotiation at renewals?
2. How easy will it be to determine the value and ROI from the ‘EX’ part of the ITSM specifically (it can be difficult to ‘unbundle’ parts of suites from each other)? For a quick EX ROI tool, see here.
3. Would it suit the business better to have just one vendor across multiple uses, or to choose a best-in-class EX solution that also integrates seamlessly with existing IT tools?

If CIOs decide to go down the route of a best-in-class EX, it’s important to ensure that selected vendors have a strong track record of success serving companies of a similar size and complexity.

To understand more about the market-leading vendors able to serve use cases that are specific to Employee Experience, see the Gartner Critical Capabilities report.

Unily ranks first in all Use Cases in the 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions.

Get the Report

3. The role of an Employee Experience Platform

3.1. More than an intranet: The evolution of the Employee Experience Platform

Traditionally, organizations used the term “intranet” to describe a central corporate portal for sharing news, resources, and documentation. The modern Employee Experience Platform (EXP) builds on that foundation by delivering an enterprise-wide environment for:

• Communication and engagement: Corporate news, leadership blogs, social feeds, and recognition programs.
• Collaboration and ideation: Team sites, project workspaces, knowledge-sharing forums, and integrated productivity tools.
• Employee services and workflows: Bringing together HR services, IT services, and other department-level services under a single interface.
• Personalization and targeting: Delivering relevant information to each user based on role, location, language, and interests.

According to a survey by Gartner, organizations that invest in purposeful and unified employee experience platforms see a 15% increase in productivity and a 21% boost in employee well-being metrics when compared to those relying solely on disparate departmental platforms.

As an evolution of the intranet, the EXP addresses the human aspects of work – culture, engagement, belonging, and knowledge exchange – along with the transactional aspects such as accessing services, resources, and information. This holistic approach resonates with modern employees who expect a frictionless experience.

3.2. Aggregating tools, information and knowledge

One of the core advantages of an EXP is its ability to aggregate a wide range of business tools and surface them in a single, cohesive interface. Rather than employees logging into multiple systems (one for HR, another for IT, another for learning management, etc.), an EXP can surface critical tasks and notifications from each system in context. Features often include:

• Single sign-on (SSO) integration, streamlining access to various tools.
• Role-based content targeting, ensuring that each user sees relevant dashboards or resources.
• Global search, which can index content from multiple repositories and deliver unified search results.
• Integrated notification systems, consolidating updates from different applications into one activity feed.

By acting as the unifying layer, the EXP keeps employees focused and productive. Research from the Digital Workplace Group found that employees can lose up to 32 minutes per day when they must hunt down information across disconnected systems. Over a year, that can translate to significant productivity losses for large organizations.

3.3 Combating digital friction

Digital friction is the gap between the ideal state of seamless technology experiences and the reality of clunky interfaces, siloed tools, and inconsistent user experiences. This friction manifests in:

• Multiple logins: Remembering different passwords for different systems.
• Tool overload: Endless switching between apps, leading to “app fatigue.”
• Information silos: Searching across disparate databases or folders for crucial knowledge.
• Process inconsistency: Different departments operating unique portals or service processes, confusing end-users.

When an EXP serves as the primary gateway to the digital workplace, it can dramatically reduce digital friction. Employees enjoy a consistent look, feel, and navigation style, along with easy access to the most critical services - IT or otherwise. A well-implemented EXP can also reduce onboarding time for new hires, as the platform becomes a single source of truth for corporate knowledge, best practices, and day-to-day tasks.

3.4. Enhancing contextual awareness and collaboration

Beyond reducing friction, an EXP fosters contextual awareness across the organization. Imagine a scenario where an employee sees a personalized homepage that displays:

• IT service tickets in progress, with real-time updates.
• Relevant HR announcements about benefits enrollment deadlines.
• Upcoming learning courses based on the employee’s role.
• Team-specific documents currently being edited in SharePoint or Google Drive.
• Social feed updates from their department or interest groups.

Each piece of information lives within a broader tapestry of context - tying the “who, what, when, and why” together. This holistic view not only saves time but encourages the organic discovery of relevant news, people, and knowledge. Collaboration tools, from chat systems to co-authoring platforms, can be embedded within the EXP, enabling employees to instantly connect with the right colleagues and swiftly solve problems.

In short, the modern Employee Experience Platform is uniquely positioned to provide the engaging, personalized, and human-centric digital ecosystem employees crave. However, the success of an EXP strategy also depends on how it incorporates and complements ITSM systems. In the next section, we explore how these platforms can - and should - work together.

4. How do these systems play together? 

4.1. The myth that "everything is a workflow"

One of the most pervasive misconceptions about the digital workplace is the notion that every interaction, request, or bit of content should be formalized as a workflow within an ITSM platform. This approach may stem from the deep-rooted strengths of ITSM in workflow automation. While it’s true that many processes can be automated or guided by workflows, not all employee experiences benefit from rigid structure.

Consider the following scenarios:

• Watercooler chats and peer recognition: Employees connecting casually to share ideas or provide recognition to a peer typically do not require (or desire) an IT-managed workflow.
• Spontaneous discovery: Stumbling on a new article, blog post, or executive update can spark ideas that lead to innovations. This moment of discovery isn’t something you ticket or track in a queue.
• Open forum ideation: Brainstorming sessions, open Q&As with leadership, or crowdsourcing ideas are best facilitated in a social, collaborative space that fosters organic conversation, not a list of linear tasks.

An EXP excels precisely because it can handle the chaos and serendipity of human interaction - while still integrating with ITSM for structured, IT-related processes. The relationship is complementary: the EXP handles discovery, engagement, and user-centric design, and the ITSM handles the formal workflow elements for service requests and incident resolution.

4.2. Beyond signposting: Engagement, serendipity and discovery

 Some organizations attempt to embed an “IT Service Portal” into their intranet or digital workplace, expecting that a few links or signposts to IT tickets will suffice. However, this approach underestimates the engagement layer that an EXP offers. Signposting is just the beginning; employees need to enjoy and value the platform if they are to adopt it as their go-to digital hub.

An EXP does not simply redirect employees to various siloed tools. Instead, it:

• Surfaces relevant updates: Displays real-time notifications about the status of IT service tickets, upcoming HR tasks, or corporate news.
• Enables self-service: Encourages employees to find and solve routine issues quickly, reducing demand on IT service desks.
• Suggests content: Uses analytics and AI-driven recommendations to guide employees toward relevant information, colleagues, or learning opportunities.
• Fosters Community: Provides forums, social feeds, and communities of practice where employees can exchange ideas and expertise.

In other words, a successful EXP approach goes beyond signposting to actively engage employees in a dynamic digital environment. IT services become just one component in a larger tapestry of daily interactions, weaving seamlessly into a broader sense of organizational culture and purpose.

4.3. IT service hubs in an EXP: A win-win scenario

When implemented correctly, ITSM platforms can operate within an EXP as an IT Service Hub, giving employees a simplified entry point for all their technology needs. This approach benefits both IT departments and employees in several ways:

1. Centralized access to IT services
   Within the EXP, users have one-click access to raise a ticket, check on an existing request, or consult a self-service knowledge base. No more hunting for the correct URL or remembering multiple login credentials.
2. Improved IT resource visibility
   IT updates and maintenance alerts can be integrated into the corporate news stream. Employees are less likely to be caught off-guard by system outages or scheduled downtime, and crucial updates (such as new software rollouts or security best practices) can be communicated more widely.
3. Consolidated analytics
   Organizations can gather insights not just on IT ticket volumes but also on how employees interact with the broader digital workplace. Are they searching for certain HR forms that might be better integrated? Which knowledge base articles are most accessed? These integrated analytics can guide strategic enhancements to both IT services and the overall employee experience.
4. Enhanced employee satisfaction
   With a single, intuitive interface for all digital interactions—from HR to collaboration spaces to IT requests - employees spend less time navigating complexity and more time focusing on high-impact work. According to a recent Forrester study, reducing friction for employees can improve overall job satisfaction by up to 27%.
5. Focus on what each platform does best
   ITSM continues to handle the structured workflows, SLAs, and ticket resolutions it was built for. Meanwhile, the EXP orchestrates how these IT services connect to the rest of the enterprise’s digital ecosystem, ensuring employees receive a consistent and engaging experience.

5. Summary and next steps

5.1 The heart of the digital workplace

ITSM solutions are undeniably essential to modern enterprises. They streamline processes, enforce accountability, and ensure IT services are delivered efficiently. Yet, the digital employee experience is broader, deeper, and more nuanced than the sum of ticket flows. The Employee Experience Platform emerges as the heart of the digital workplace, weaving together IT services, HR support, corporate communications, collaborative spaces, and more into a cohesive ecosystem.

Far from undermining the value of ITSM, a well-orchestrated EXP enhances it by:

• Serving as the primary gateway for all employee needs.
• Elevating ITSM content, updates, and requests into the daily flow of work.
• Reducing digital friction through single sign-on, unified search, and integrated notifications.
• Providing engagement, community, and discovery features that simply cannot be replicated through an ITSM ticketing lens.

5.2. A unified future

Looking to the future, digital workplaces will only grow more sophisticated. With the rise of AI-driven personalization, predictive analytics, and a globally distributed workforce, leaders must ensure that their technology investments deliver synergy rather than fragmentation. Deploying a robust EXP at the center of your digital workplace strategy is one of the most powerful moves an organization can make.

According to the 2024 IDC Future of Work Survey, 80% of enterprises plan to invest in comprehensive employee experience solutions over the next two years. Many are doing so precisely because they see the limitations of siloed approaches—especially those that rely solely on ITSM to deliver the full digital experience.

5.3. Get in touch

For readers evaluating their next intranet or digital workplace project, the message is clear: you need a true Employee Experience Platform that brings all elements of the employee experience under one roof. ITSM is a cornerstone of efficient operations but should be leveraged as part of a broader, human-centric platform - one that supports innovation, engagement, and enterprise-wide collaboration.

Ready to learn more?

We at Unily have spent two decades building and refining the technology that powers some of the world’s largest and most complex digital workplaces. Our Employee Experience Platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with critical ITSM solutions - providing the best of both worlds. If you’re ready to explore how an EXP can help your organization overcome digital friction and drive tangible business outcomes, contact us today to discuss your next intranet project.