Service Strategy

Service Strategy

What are services:

Services are the means of delivering value to customers. Value is delivered by providing deliverables/output as required.

Value is composed of two basic elements namely utility and warranty. Utility attributes to the use and performance of any service which includes removal of any constraints thereof. Warranty attributes to the service availability when needed with enough capacity, secure and continuous.

Whenever a company is working on delivering services, first step is to strategize the same. Service strategy is the first step to define service roadmap and based on it service design and operations are decided.

Service Strategy Principles:

There are few principles which are base for any service strategy. These principles guide a company to strategics and design services accordingly. They are:

1.   Value creation

Value for any service needs to be created for a customer. This value can be qualitative or quantitative. Most of the time financial value is difficult to evaluate for a value and quantitative parameters play a major role.

Utility and warranty plays a big role over here followed by communication of value to customers.

2.   Service assets

For a company to be successful and deliver best of the class services to its customer, it needs to create service assets which can assist them in the same. Service assets include capabilities & resources, business units and service units, etc.

To create service assets, company needs to take a longer view of the market and need of its customers, post which it has to invest both time and money to develop world class assets.

3.   Service provider types

Third principle on which service strategy is based is the type of provider like internal service provider, external service provider or shared one.

Based on the type of service provider, service design and other things changes.

4.   Service structure

It is important to refer various service structures already in place like value chain, value network etc. taking a cue from there and understanding their market and customers, a company can create its own customized service network

5.   Service strategy fundamentals

Strategy is simple but it does not mean that it is easy. A company needs to look at various stakeholders (both internal and external) and work accordingly

Steps in service strategy

Various steps included in service strategy phase are outlined below. These are indicative in nature and provide a framework to a company. They are:

1.   Define the market

2.   Develop the offerings

3.   Develop strategic assets

4.   Prepare for execution

ITIL Introduction

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of processes/guidelines for managing IT services. Process is core to any business deliverable as it directly affects end users. keeping this in mind ITIL helps to map/align business requirement, needs and deliverable with IT services.

IT service management (ITSM) life-cycle starts with strategy and goes till continuous improvement in the same. The whole cycle is divided into 5 broad categories viz: 

1. Service Strategy
2. Service Design
3. Service Transition
4. Service Operation
5. Continual Service Improvement

Based on these 5 categories, ITIL latest version ITIL v3 consists of 5 core publications as above. All these core publication describes various procedures, activities, tasks, milestones, checklists, deliverable, best practices etc. which can be used by organizations to form a layout.

Basically it is a framework which is not company specific and can be customized based upon requirement usage.

Need for ITIL

In today’s world, Business has become more complex and dependent on IT. Demand from customers is growing and due to competition and globalization there is always a pressure on cost. Due to this flexibility, scalability and adaptability is required at each level.

Implementing ITIL will help in the following:

• Set up a standard process in the company
• Reduces rework, errors and improves deliverables, services and utilization
• Companies can improve upon their service availability, reliability and security
• More aligned business needs and requirements to IT
• Better and comprehensive documentation