Internal service - A service delivered between departments or business units in the same organization.
External Service - A service delivered to external customers.
Just as there are internal and external customers, there are internal and external services. Internal services are delivered between departments or business units in the same organization. External services are delivered to external customers.
The reason for differentiating between internal and external services is to differentiate between services that support an internal activity, and those that actually achieve business outcomes. The difference may not appear to be significant at first, since the activity to deliver the services is often similar. However, it is important to recognize that internal services have to be linked to external services before their contribution to business outcomes can be understood and measured. This is especially important when measuring the return on investment of services (see section 3.6.1).
Figure 3.5 Internal and external services
Figure 3.5 shows the difference between internal and external services for an IT service provider. These are described in more detail in the next two sections.
IT services
An IT service is a service that is provided to one or more customers by an IT service provider. An IT service is based on the use of information technology and supports the customer’s business processes. It is made up of a combination of people, processes and technology.
There are three types of IT service, as shown in Table 3.4.
Table 3.4 Types of IT service
Type of service
|
Definition
|
Description
|
Supporting
service, sometimes called an infrastructure service, although they are often
broader than just infrastructure
|
A service that is not
directly used by the business, but is required by the IT service provider so
they can provide other IT services – for example, directory services, naming
services, the network or communication services.
|
Supporting services are
defined to allow IT teams to identify the interdependencies between
ITcomponents. They will also show how these components are used to deliver
internal and external customer-facing services. Supporting services enable IT
processes and services, but are not directly visible to the customer. Some IT
teams view recipients of supporting services as ‘customers’. Although this
promotes good service quality, it is also misleading. Supporting services
only exist to be combined with other supporting services to produce
customer-facing services. If they cannot, they are of no value and their
existence should be questioned.
There can be no service level
agreements for supporting services as they are all internal to the same
department. Instead, the performance of supporting services should be managed
using operational level agreements.
It should be noted that Figure
3.5 only refers to services originating inside the organization. In some
cases supporting services from outside the organization. In these are sourced
from outside the organization. In these cases they are managed in the same
way as other supporting services, but using underpinning contracts rather
than operational level agreements.
|
Internal
customer-facing service
|
An IT service that directly
supports a business process managed by another business unit – for example,
sales reporting service, enterprise resource management.
|
An internal customer-facing
service is identified and defined by the business. If it cannot be perceived
by the business as a service, then it is probably a supporting service.
Internal
customer-facing services rely on an integrated set of supporting services,
although these are often not seen or understood by the customer or user.
Internal customer-facing services are managed according to service level
agreements.
|
External
customer-facing service
|
An IT service that is
directly provided by IT to an external customer – for example, internet
access at an airport.
|
An external customer-facing
service is available to external customers and is offered to meet business
objectives defined in the organization’s strategy.
An external customer-facing
IT service is also a business service in its own right, since it is used to
conduct the business of the organization with external customers.
Depending on the
strategy of the organization,
the service is either provided free of charge (many government agencies
provide services to the public for no fee), or it is billed directly to the
person or organization using the service. In other cases, the service may be
provided free to the customer, but paid for by a third party, such as an
advertiser or sponsor. These services are managed using a contract – even a
simple online agreement constitutes a contract of sale and purchase with
terms and conditions.
|
Note on external customer-facing services
Internal IT organizations are not the only providers of external services to customers. Outsourcers, internet service providers and cloud service providers are all examples of organizations that are in the business of providing external services – and the technology departments providing these services are business units, supported by internal IT service providers.
A better strategy for supporting these business processes is to start by defining the outcomes (see next section) and then identifying the IT services that support them, and after that defining how supporting services will be aligned to support the entire chain of dependencies.
Business services and products provided by other business units
A business service is defined as a service that is delivered to business customers by business units; for example, delivery of financial services to customers of a bank, or goods to the customers of a retail store. Successful delivery of business services often depends on one or more IT services.
Although IT is not directly responsible for the business’s services and products, it is responsible for providing IT services which will enable the outcomes to be met. Thus it is important that IT knows what these services are, how the business uses IT services and how these services are measured. This will directly impact the way in which IT’s contribution to the organization is met.
One way of doing this is to define the business activities needed to produce the outcomes as vital business functions. These are discussed more fully in section 4.4 on availability management in ITIL Service Design.
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