Our own, inimitable Molly Holliday -- senior consultant in newScale's Front Office Strategy team -- has published a very nice, pragmatic article in the latest issue of the ITSMf Forum.
An excerpt here with a link at the bottom.
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To define your services, the first step I typically recommend is to identify the major business processes or functions in your organization. You can then define business services around those business processes – asking yourself how IT enables that function. It may be as simple as defining those business services as a Payroll Service or Claims Processing Service.
To define your services, the first step I typically recommend is to identify the major business processes or functions in your organization. You can then define business services around those business processes – asking yourself how IT enables that function. It may be as simple as defining those business services as a Payroll Service or Claims Processing Service.
It’s right here that I sometimes lose people; IT wants to say “we’re not payroll experts – we don’t really offer payroll services”. This is really a matter of semantics – you can name your service Payroll Systems & Support if you want to but don’t get wrapped around the axle naming your business services; ask your business customers for help in defining the right names if it becomes a problem.
We now want to look at how these business services are being consumed by customers and develop well-formed and complete service offerings.
Best practice attributes for a service offering include:
* Customer-Relevant Name and Description
* Service Levels and Objectives
* Pricing Information and Consumption Management Tips
The next step is to identify and define the underlying technical services. This is a very beneficial exercise in many organizations because you may uncover a number of IT systems or applications that are all serving the same purpose. This opens the door for consolidation of duplicate systems, rationalization of services, and potentially very significant cost reduction. A tip for defining your technology services is to think like an outsourcer; build offerings that you can compare to the services of external providers.
We now want to look at how these business services are being consumed by customers and develop well-formed and complete service offerings.
Best practice attributes for a service offering include:
* Customer-Relevant Name and Description
* Service Levels and Objectives
* Pricing Information and Consumption Management Tips
The next step is to identify and define the underlying technical services. This is a very beneficial exercise in many organizations because you may uncover a number of IT systems or applications that are all serving the same purpose. This opens the door for consolidation of duplicate systems, rationalization of services, and potentially very significant cost reduction. A tip for defining your technology services is to think like an outsourcer; build offerings that you can compare to the services of external providers.
The complete article is here: The Forum - 10/18/2008.
My wife works at a small hospital that has a very small IT team, I think of 2, who she is constantly complaining about. Recently she told me she was given an EVDO card to support her need for being able to work from home while on call, but that when she had problems activating the card she was rebuffed by IT who told her that "we don't support communications" and told her to go to the vendor.
Can you imagine anything so silly? Here is a clear case of a service that IT should be providing, that ties directly to patient care, which is what their business is. I really wish I could fix her IT team! First thing they would benefit from would be building out their service catalog and doing it collaboratively with the business, not in a back room somewhere.
Posted by: IT Governance Blog | Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 02:44 AM