Statement of Best Practice
IT Service Management (ITSM) centers around the idea that the IT organization is a service provider. As such, the ability to draw borders around the various IT services such that they can be managed and optimized is critical to long term success.
Contact
- Assistant Director, IT Process and Planning
Definitions
- IT Service: a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks; information maintained in the TDX Service Catalog
- Client-facing Service: a service used by faculty, staff, and students outside of IT
- Examples: email, Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), point-of-sale
- Supporting Service: a service required by a client-facing service to allow it to provide value
- Examples: identify and access management, Internet connectivity
- Request Model: an action to subscribe or take specific action for a IT Service; information maintained in the TDX Service Catalog
- IT Service Offering: a bundle of service components with slight variation to achieve a specific outcome; information maintained in the Assets application of TDX
- Service Component: a specific technology component of a service; information maintained in the Assets application of TDX
Roles and Responsibilities
- Service Owner: responsible for defining and negotiating Service Level Agreements and ensuring that these are met
- Service Component Owner: responsible for lifecycle of a specific technology component
- Leadership Team Sponsor: member of the IT Leadership Team who inherits executive accountability for service provision from the service owner
Is it a Service?
Differentiating a business service from an IT service or a service asset
The most complex part of this process is drawing boundaries around what exactly an IT service is. Characteristics of an IT service include the following:
- Value extends across entire service lifecycle (strategy, design, build, operate, improve)
- End-to-end outcome achievable in single interaction
- Meets a user need without technical expertise
- Makes the complex simple
- Crosses organizational silos in a coordinated effort to design, build, and operate over the entire service lifecycle
- Underlying technologies used to deliver the service are transparent
The following guidelines are often helpful to differentiate a service from a service asset or business services:
- Could I run a company providing just this thing to faculty, staff, or students?
- Does it produce value alone (outcomes that customers want to achieve)?
- Is not a vendor product/application — many applications become the pillar of a service but are rarely the service itself
- Enables the customer to do something of value they could not otherwise do on their own
- IT assumes costs and risks
- In a complex organization like Miami, we encounter many situations in which the customer may be paying the licensing costs of an application, which is then joined with other service assets to deliver value back to the customer. In an ideal world, the business partner would simply be paying for the service and the IT organization would pay the licensing cost. Nonetheless, understanding the costs for a service can help determine if you have a business service, and IT service, or service asset.
Microsoft litmus test for defining an IT service:
- UNIQUE "bundling" of a suite of IT services (defined infrastructure, resources, processes)
- Delivered DIRECTLY to a business customer
- Can be readily LINKED to a business process
- Can be DESCRIBED in business terms
- Has RECOGNIZED “stand alone” value that the business clearly understands they would pay for, whether delivered internally or externally
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