Service Archetype

Submitted by nabil_mneimneh on Tue, 2010-04-13 22:29
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Dear Wizard,

What is a Service Archetype, and how it is different from LOS?

Is Figure 4.4 in Service Strategy exhaustive or it is just an example?

Thank you

Dear Nabil

It's funny you should ask. I play croquet occasionally with one of the authors and we were discussing that very Figure 4.4 over a few hoops. I maintain that it should have been possible to use alliteration in the naming of all nine of the archetypes. As part of that debate, I tried to get him to accept that there is a tenth archtype, U10: Fiscal Transfer Services, where the two parties have agreed to move money from one to the other for reasons not immediately evident in the service delivered (I call it Lend, Leech, Launder). But he was adamant the list of nine is complete. You must draw your own conclusions about that, whether you want to follow my advice, or that of a mere ITIL author (they don't get out much you know).

As to the difference between Archetype and LOS, I defer to Whitman and Gross in their view that the RMZ of LOS renders it distinct from Archetypes per se, although some say that is too strict an interpretation and the two can be considered the same in most contexts, except of course GSS (see Fliss, in his great itSMF keynote of 1997).

Good luck!
The ITIL Wizard

Published in The Skeptical Informer, August 2010, Volume 4, No. 3


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