This is a favorite of the blog....
IT services themselves can be bundles of other IT services. A perfect example is the workplace service of “new employee set up;” it may have a number of service components like employee orientation, e-mail, network access, and a new desktop computer. But the desktop computer can be a service by itself and also contain service components, such as: asset management, support services, security, etc.
Another example is e-mail accounts that consume storage. This may have a storage management service to provision, maintain, backup and restore, as part of the e-mail service. Additionally a “request restore” is also a separate service.
Are all services orderable? The answer is depends on who is the customer! Remember one of the characteristics of a service is to abstract complexity for our customer. But we have different customers (more on this another time).
Some services are directly consumable by just about anyone in the enterprise, such as network access (which needs to include adding and removing network ID’s). We call these entitlement services—everyone gets them. Often these represent our high volume of requests.
Others services are only available to specialized communities or market segments. Storage services tend to be services that IT provides to other IT groups, and not directly to employees—with few exceptions, like adding more storage to your e-mail account. There’s a large number of IT infrastructure services where the customer is the application development organization.
Finally there’s a class of services which are mandatory; these too have a life-cycle in that someone requested them at one point, but they remain mandatory until further notice. These services are part of the overhead of running IT and need to be included to develop a true activity-based cost for a service. Some examples of these services are capacity planning, relationship management, business continuity management, compliance management and security management.
In offering e-mail services, these types of services are implicit. There are excellent reasons to hide these entirely. But there are also excellent reasons to show them. What are the rules?
Hide a service component if:
- The costs of the service is minimal; there's no need to name every aspect of a product down to the cost of cellophane
- The service costs is highly fixed and will need to be allocated.
- It’s a controversial for the customer to pay for the service.
For example, the customer may not want pay for relationship management nor for human resource management—it’s just part of the overhead.
Show a service in the bundle if:
- The cost is a meaningful percentage of the overall service cost,
- The cost is variable through consumption
- Showing the component service addresses a frequent question or common concern the customer may have
- A competitor or external service provider includes it as an optional service in their offering
- Calling it out will help you explain better your differentiation from a competitor
- It's required by law, regulation or compliance.
For example, in e-mail services, as of this writing virus protection is standard, but still new, while spam filtering is not yet widely adopted so calling out spam filtering important to e-mail. The same applies to storage since it’s a variable cost to e-mail, and finally compliance management and any record retention services you may need to provide. The latter will add to the cost of the service; calling them out helps explain why the costs is higher than a generic e-mail service.
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