The services CATALOGUED (not just mentioned) in ITIL Tech Service Catalogue are the same as those in the Business SC

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More complicated

The question is not very clear, at least I had to struggle with it which might explain why people do not vote.

In my opinion the ITIL view is far too simplified, you cannot just split the services in the two classes. Look at travel services.

Last week we spent a few days in Rome, so I will use that as an example. I might have bought a package which would have included the flight, local transportation, hotel and possibly some trips and meals. As I do not like that kind of trips, I arranged it myself. I bought flights from Finnair, hotel from booking.com (I recommend Majestic on Via Veneto, very nice) and transportation locally. Here we already have two different types of business services, single sourcing package service or multiple sourcing basic services.

Included in these services were "hidden" services like cleaning. I did not buy the cleaning service and we never saw the cleaner but we could see that the the room was clean and stayed clean. Nothing was broken so I'm sure there must have been a maintenance service but again I did not see it.

Flying back we upgraded to business class and had a nice flight with champange (April 30 - May 1 is the one and only carneval in Finland, Vappu) and actually good food. Somewhere there must be a service that provides Finnair with the cold bubbly and the meals.

In most service production there are several levels of services, some are very visual and some are more or less hidden unless something goes wrong. There are no rules of what is included in the "basic" service. Our breakfast in the Majestic was included as we were European travellers. It is entirely possible that the noisy American group that arrived on the last morning was paying extra as that is the rule in USA.

Now IT service is far more complex than a hotel and we have much less experience in selling or buying it. Trying to force all the services in the two classes of Business and Technical is not practical.

Related to this I'm in the middle of writing a survey report. It was an e-mail survey with one open question only. "What are the main problems or challenges of IT service?" The clear number one challenge is: "Defining IT services". Nearly 40 % of the respondents mention it.

Aale

this is clear to me

Sorry I laboured hard to make that question clear, so I'd love feedback on what's not. (One of the limitations of Drupal is no explanatory text on polls - I'd love to find the time to fix that). There is an amplifying discussion here

The example you use describes many services. Some are core services and supporting services precisely as described in Service Strategy 5.5.4.1. They are all customer-facing services - ones that you see, choose and consume. Others are infrastructure services, internal services that a third party provided to the service provider not to you, such as room cleaning or food supply to airplanes. These are called supporting services by Service Design which contradicts SS usage of "supporting", so I avoid that term as ambiguous.

So the question is about distinguishing between the services provided to the customer and the services provided to the provider. In my view, the TSC and BSC both catalogue the services provided to the customer, and that's all. the TSC will mention the third-party services as components of a catalogued service (this is what SD Figure 4.3 shows) but not as catalogued services in themselves.

If we look at the basics of what a catalogue is for then this is clear to me. it mystifies me that it isn't clear to others. there is a disconnect here somewhere and I can't find it.

Skeptical of the skeptic

I fear there is some dogmatism here un-becoming to the IT Skeptic.

Let me pose (again) a real world example that shows the hopelessness of strict distinctions here.

Large IT organization in a multi-line enterprise. The infrastructure team provides hosting services that are used by the IT organization's application teams, which in turn build and run the large transactional systems. By the argument here, the hosting service is technical, invisible to the customer.

However, what if the IT organization does not have a monopoly on writing applications? What about when a business unit wants to directly order a hosting service so their supposedly more agile developers (embedded in "the business") can write and run an application? How do we understand any kind of business vs. technical distinction when IT doesn't matter and its practitioners may be found anywhere, not just under a traditional CIO?

I could provide many more real world examples. I think that we need to look at the problem differently than attempting some delineation based on perceived technicality of the service. I'd start more by looking at whether the service is truly black box/repeatable and can have declarative constraints applied (e.g. SLAs), and I'd also apply some common sense thinking re: granularity - we know the concept is scale free (recursive/fractal etc) so how do we solve for that?

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

Agree on both

Yes, IT is multi line. IT produces commodity services (like standard server hosting), it produces combined services (commodity with some icing, which will become commodity in the future) and services that are higher up the food chain (depending on where you go, IT may not only provide the application that manages a business process, it may even be responsible for executing a part of that process).

But still the question is valid, can we seperate our service catalog into two sections Business / Technical? And what does ITIL mean with this seperation? We may ignore ITIL and stick to our own taxonomy, but still ITIL does have quite some marketing power, so people will think about the service catalog in these two "sections".

I would have posed the question as this:
Do you think that ITIL implies that:
> the Technical Service Catalog should contain only the technical construction of the business services (it may mention other non-customer visible services) or
> the Technical Service Catalog should contain additional services, which are not customer visible and do not appear in the business service catalog or
> the term customer needs to be more clearly defined, if it includes IT internal customers or
> the ITIL books are unclear on this. But I still need a seperation beontween technical an business catalog or
> the ITIL books are unclear on this. But I don't care, I need no seperation between business & technical catalog
> Be aware of the IT-dogmatic, as allways: It depends

think you are making exactly my point

Charles I think you are making exactly my point. I'm saying there is NO "delineation based on perceived technicality of the service". there is only one kind of service, that which is delivered to a customer.

If I'm being dogmatic it is because i see the geeks indulging in what ian calls "inside-out" thinking, a pernicious blight that rots service management from within.

I have a thought on how to further clarify my dogmatic position but I'm taking this over to the other thread just to keep ideas together.

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