User:Sundgauvien38/sandbox

Service definitions
In ITSM world, many terms have a more restrictive definition than in common language. If reasons to have to know all these definitions could first not appear so obvious, it is anyway important to ensure that when using these terms, everybody has the same meaning in mind.

Outcome
"The outcome is the result of carrying out an activity, following a process, or delivering an IT service etc. The term is used to refer to intended results as well as to actual results."

The outcome is actually what a customer wants and for what he is ready to request a service.

Service
"A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks."

The service is what needs to be delivered to the customer to let him achieve his outcome.

IT service
"The IT service is provided by an IT service provider. An IT service is made up of a combination of information technology, people and processes."

As it could be easily guessed, an IT service is delivered by an IT service provider. Actually, we find three main kinds of IT services, means infrastructure, application and business process.

Service types
A service to deliver will be actually split in several services; each of them will provide a single deliverable to be used by another service. These services could be classified in different types, depending to who they will be addressed and how.

Internal customer-facing service
"An internal customer-facing service is provided by the same organization as its customer."

The internal customer facing services will be provided inside a company or organisation from one service or department to another.

External customer facing service
"An external customer-facing service is provided by a different organization from its customer."

Opposite to internal, the external customer facing service is delivered to another company The differentiation is important for at least accounting departments as external customer facing service is often expected to generate business revenues while the internal customer facing service will only create move between cost centres.

Supporting service
"A supporting service is not directly used by the business, but is required by the IT service provider to deliver customer-facing services."

The main difference between internal customer facing service and supporting service is that a customer facing service is designed to be delivered to both internal and external customers; the supporting service is more considered as something that is needed but despite it would help, could not generate direct revenues.

Service classification
Services could also be classified on how they are connected each other and with customer requirements.

Core service
"A core service delivers the basic outcomes desired by one or more customers."

The core service is actually what the customer has asked to his provider.

Enabling service
"An enabling service is needed in order to deliver a core service."

An enabling service, compared to a supporting service can be seen by a customer even if it could not be directly charged to him.

Enhancing service
"An enhanced service is added to a core service to make it more attractive to the customer."

An enhanced service is not asked by the customer but will be a key differentiator against the provider competitors.

Service package
"A service package contains two or more services that have been combined to offer a solution to a specific type of customer need or to underpin specific business outcomes."

The services of a package could be delivered at various levels, depending on customer need.

Service value
The value of an IT service may be difficult to figure out on a first view as it has nothing concrete; it could anyway be considered as what could be deserved to ask – and pay - for a service. Actually, it contains two main parts.

Utility
"An utility is the functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need."

The utility is what the customer will actually receive and will fit his outcome purpose.

Warranty
"A warranty is the assurance that a product or service will meet agreed requirements. This may be a formal agreement such as a service level agreement or contract, or it may be a marketing message or brand image."

The warranty covers how the utility will be delivered in order to fit the outcome use.

Service assets
To properly deliver a service, a provider will need assets. They could be sorted out in two different categories.

Resource
"A resource is a generic term that includes IT infrastructure, people, money or anything else that might help to deliver an IT service."

Compared to the next topic, resources cover all tangible provider assets.

Capability
"The capability refers to the ability of an organization, person, process, application, IT service or other configuration item to carry out an activity."

Having enough resources is not sufficient to deliver the service. For example, even if a provider has a lot of people available, he will not be able to deliver a service in a proper manner if none of them have been trained on the specific service.

Service composition
When setting up a new service, all of its components should be evaluated in order to ensure they will fulfil the current and potential future customer needs.

Business process
"A process that is owned and carried out by the business. A business process contributes to the delivery of a product or service to a business customer. For example, a retailer may have a purchasing process that helps to deliver services to its business customers. Many business processes rely on IT services."

A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers. It often can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or with a Process Matrix as a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process.

It could be defined as how to raise all the service functional needs.

Core service
As already stated, the core service is what the customer has asked to his provider.

Service design package
"Document(s) defining all aspects of an IT service and its requirements through each stage of its lifecycle. A service design package is produced for each new IT service, major change or IT service retirement."

The purpose of Service Design Package, also called SDP, is to document each service requirements at all stages of its lifecycle.

Business case
"Justification for a significant item of expenditure. The business case includes information about costs, benefits, options, issues, risks and possible problems."

A business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argument or presentation. The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or effort are consumed, they should be in support of a specific business need. An example could be that a software upgrade might improve system performance, but the "business case" is that better performance would improve customer satisfaction, require less task processing time, or reduce system maintenance costs. A compelling business case adequately captures both the quantifiable and unquantifiable characteristics of a proposed project.

The business cases provide what could be expected by the service in term of Return on Investment.

Service level agreement
"An agreement between an IT service provider and a customer. A service level agreement describes the IT service, documents service level targets, and specifies the responsibilities of the IT service provider and the customer. A single agreement may cover multiple IT services or multiple customers."

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a part of a service contract where a service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time (of the service or performance). As an example, Internet service providers will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. In this case the SLA will typically have a technical definition in terms of mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair or mean time to recovery (MTTR); various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details.

By other words, it is a formal understanding with customer about the scope and the level of quality to provide. ,

Service level requirement
"A customer requirement for an aspect of an IT service. Service level requirements are based on business objectives and used to negotiate agreed service level targets."

A Service Level Requirement (SLR) is a broad statement from a customer to a service provider describing their service expectations. A service provider prepares a service level agreement (SLA) based on the requirements from the customer. For example: A customer may require a server be operational (uptime) for 99.95% of the year excluding maintenance.

It depicts the level required by the customer and that will be used to define the SLA.

Infrastructure
Infrastructure is defined in ITIL as a combined set of hardware, software, networks, facilities, etc. (including all of the information technology), in order to develop, test, deliver, monitor, control or support IT services. Associated people, processes and documentation are not part of IT Infrastructure.

It covers all IT equipment (Servers, network, personal computers …); most of the services related to this are supporting services as they are not seen by the customer but needed to deliver the core service.

Environment
"A subset of the IT infrastructure that is used for a particular purpose – for example, live environment, test environment, build environment. Also used in the term ‘physical environment’ to mean the accommodation, air conditioning, power system etc. Environment is used as a generic term to mean the external conditions that influence or affect something."

The environment is what to be set up to let infrastructure provides the required level of service in a reasonable manner.

Data
The data depicts what needs to be collected or transferred in order to provide the core service.

Application
"Software that provides functions which are required by an IT service. Each application may be part of more than one IT service. An application runs on one or more servers or clients."

Applications cover all pieces of software used by the infrastructure to deliver the core service.

Integration
Integration refers to the interaction between the various applications and the data they will need to carry in order, at the end, to deliver the core service in a level expected by the customer.

Operational level agreement
"An agreement between an IT service provider and another part of the same organization. It supports the IT service provider’s delivery of IT services to customers and defines the goods or services to be provided and the responsibilities of both parties."

An operational-level agreement (OLA) defines the interdependent relationships among the internal support groups of an organization working to support a service-level agreement (SLA). The agreement describes the responsibilities of each internal support group toward other support groups, including the process and timeframe for delivery of their services. The objective of the OLA is to present a clear, concise and measurable description of the service provider's internal support relationships.

Supporting service
As previously stated above, the supporting survives are all the services not firmly required by the customer but that will be anyway needed to properly deliver the core service.

IT process
IT processes are needed by the IT service provider to deliver successfully the core service as defined in the SLA.

Function
"A team or group of people and the tools or other resources they use to carry out one or more processes or activities."

The functions depict all internal support team in charge of the various IT components.

In small organisations, people could run several functions while in a big one a function could be shared between several departments. Anyway, in this latter case, management needs to take appropriate care to ensure someone keeps an end to end view of the whole process.

Roles
"A set of responsibilities, activities and authorities assigned to a person or team. A role is defined in a process or function. Role is also used to describe the purpose of something or what it is used for."

The role is the activity or responsibility provided to a team in order to control that resources are properly delivered to a service.

Suppliers
"A third party responsible for supplying goods or services that are required to deliver IT services. Examples of suppliers include commodity hardware and software vendors, network and telecom providers, and outsourcing organizations."

The supplier is an external third party who will have to deliver support to any of the service component.

Service Management
"A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services."

Service management refers to the implementation and management of quality information technology services. it is performed by IT service providers through people, process and information technology. It is process-focused and is not concerned with the details of how to use a particular vendor's product, or necessarily with the technical details of the systems under management. Instead, it focuses upon providing a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users.

The service management could therefore be considered as the ability to ensure that all components of a service as described in the previous chapter will be enough to deliver the core service as agreed with the customer through the SLA.

Stakeholders
"A person who has an interest in an organization, project, IT service etc. Stakeholders may be interested in the activities, targets, resources or deliverables. Stakeholders may include customers, partners, employees, shareholders, owners etc."

Stakeholders are all people, organization or others who are involved in the business process as customer, provider …

Service providers
"An organization supplying services to one or more internal customers or external customers."

A service provider is a groupthat provides organizations with consulting, legal, real estate, education, communications, storage, processing, and many other services.

Any IT service could be considered as a service provider delivering an outcome to a customer

IT professionals differentiate between service providers by categorizing them as type I, II, or III. The three service types are recognized by the IT industry although specifically defined by ITIL and the US Telecommunications Act of 1996:

Type I service provider
"An internal service provider that is embedded within a business unit. There may be several Type I service providers within an organization."

As they are funded by business unit overheads, the type I providers avoid costs and risks generally faced when dealing with external customers.

Type II service provider
"An internal service provider that provides shared IT services to more than one business unit. Type II service providers are also known as shared service units."

Shared services refers to the provision of a service by one part of an organization or group where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of 'sharing' within an organization or group.

Typical shared service units are human resources, finance, IT and other services in a company that are shared between several business units.

Type III service provider
"A service provider that provides IT services to external customers."

External providers is often used to not have to support assets needed to provide a service.

Customer
"Someone who buys goods or services. The customer of an IT service provider is the person or group who defines and agrees the service level targets.C"

Here also and as already stated previously, a distinction is made between customers who share the same organization then providers and others.

Internal customers
"A customer who works for the same business as the IT service provider."

The internal customer is someone or a group of people who will get the core service and who are in the same company or organization than the provider.

External customer
"A customer who works for a different business from the IT service provider."

An external customer is actually paying money and therefore generates direct revenue to receive the service.

Users
"A person who uses the IT service on a day-to-day basis. Users are distinct from customers, as some customers do not use the IT service directly."

Users are actually those who will actually use the service. Very often in a company, the customer will be the purchasing department that will buy the service to the provider, but it will be another department who will use it.

Suppliers
"A third party responsible for supplying goods or services that are required to deliver IT services. Examples of suppliers include commodity hardware and software vendors, network and telecom providers, and outsourcing organizations."

While providers will deliver the core service, the supplier will deal with the supporting services, infrastructure and others.

Process
"A structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective. A process takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs. It may include any of the roles, responsibilities, tools and management controls required to reliably deliver the outputs. A process may define policies, standards, guidelines, activities and work instructions if they are needed."

Processes define sequences of actions with their dependencies. They should comply with the various policies defined at various levels like company, departments …

Process model
When the processes are defined, they have to be documented, describing the flow between incoming and outgoing data, which people have to take care of what … It also contains how to deal with the required tools, how to measure its efficiency in order to make enhancements.

Process characteristics
An ITIL process should also cover four main domains:
 * Well defined metrics have to be enabled in order to measure the process efficiency.
 * The method to check the achievement of the expected outcome is clearly identified
 * Someone has to ensure the process will meet the customer expectation whatever he is internal or external.
 * At last, a process should easily be amended in order to reply to a specific requirement.

Functions
"A team or group of people and the tools or other resources they use to carry out one or more processes or activities; for example, the service desk."

As already described above, the functions cover all internal teams in charge of supporting the various IT components.

Role
"A set of responsibilities, activities and authorities assigned to a person or team. A role is defined in a process or function. One person or team may have multiple roles; for example, the roles of configuration manager and change manager may be carried out by a single person."

A role defined what is expected by each of the various stakeholders involved in a process. The role and responsibilities matrix that details all of them is part of the process documentation.

RACI
"A model used to help define roles and responsibilities. RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed."

A RACI matrix describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project or business process. It is especially useful in clarifying roles and responsibilities in cross-functional/departmental projects and processes.

RACI is acronyms derived from the four key responsibilities most typically used:
 * R (Responsible): those who do the work to achieve the task. There is at least one role with a participation type of responsible, although others can be delegated to assist in the work required.
 * A (Accountable): the one ultimately answerable for the correct and thorough completion of the deliverable or task, and the one who delegates the work to those responsible. In other words, an accountable must sign off (approve) on work that responsible provides. There must be only one accountable specified for each task or deliverable.
 * C (Consulted): those whose opinions are sought, typically subject matter experts; and with whom there is two-way communication.
 * I (Informed): those who are kept up-to-date on progress, often only on completion of the task or deliverable; and with whom there is just one-way communication.

Service owner
"A role responsible for managing one or more services throughout their entire lifecycle. Service owners are instrumental in the development of service strategy and are responsible for the content of the service portfolio."

The service owner is the service representative within an organization. He is working with business representative in defining deliverables that will fit customer’s outcomes and is accountable of the service delivery.

Process owner
"The person who is held accountable for ensuring that a process is fit for purpose. The process owner's responsibilities include sponsorship, design, change management and continual improvement of the process and its metrics. This role can be assigned to the same person who carries out the process manager role, but the two roles may be separate in larger organizations."

The process owner is responsible for designing the processes necessary to achieve the objectives of the business plans that are created by the Business Leaders. The process owner is responsible for the creation, update and approval of documents (procedures, work instructions/protocols) to support the process. Many process owners are supported by a process improvement team. The process owner uses this team as a mechanism to help create a high performance process. The process owner is the only person who has authority to make changes in the process and manages the entire process improvement cycle to ensure performance effectiveness. This person is the contact person for all information related to the process. This person is accountable for the effectiveness of the process

Process manager
"A role responsible for the operational management of a process. The process manager's responsibilities include planning and coordination of all activities required to carry out, monitor and report on the process. There may be several process managers for one process; for example, regional change managers or IT service continuity managers for each data centre. The process manager role is often assigned to the person who carries out the process owner role, but the two roles may be separate in larger organizations.I"

The process manager is focused on the operational topics while the process owner is more dealing with questions around design. He will therefore manage the appropriate resources and infrastructure to ensure the process activities are carried out as expected.

Process practitioner
The process practitioner is in charge of some of the task of the process. Even if he needs to have a view of the whole service, his main role is to ensure the task will be completed and will provide the results it is expected to give.

Competence and skills framework
Service management and human resources have to use competence framework in order to ensure they have the skills required by the services they propose, allocate proper resources and developing new competences to follow the future business needs. The most common used in Information and Communication Technology world is the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) It maps out the range of skills as a two-dimensional table, by tagging each skill with a category and responsibility level.

Best practice
"Proven activities or processes that have been successfully used by multiple organizations. ITIL is an example of best practice."

A good way to ensure continuity in the quality of a delivered service is to reuse the processes that have already proven their efficiency. These methods collections are called best practices. They can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered and could be considered as a business buzzword, used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use.

Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking.