What is Service Management

To understand what service management is, we need to understand what

services are, and how service management can help service providers to deliver

and manage these services.

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.

A simple example of a customer outcome that could be facilitated by an IT

service might be: “Sales people spending more time interacting with

customers” facilitated by “a remote access service that enables reliable access

to corporate sales systems from sales people’s laptops”.Publish Post

The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the reason why they purchase

or use the service. The value of the service to the customer is directly dependent

on how well it facilitates these outcomes. Service management is what enables

a service provider to understand the services they are providing, to ensure that

the services really do facilitate the outcomes their customers want to achieve, to

understand the value of the services to their customers, and to understand and

manage all of the costs and risks associated with those services.

Service Management is a set of specialized organizational

capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of

services.

These “specialized organizational capabilities” are described in this pocket

guide. They include all of the processes, methods, functions, roles and activities

that a Service Provider uses to enable them to deliver services to their

customers.

Service management is concerned with more than just delivering services. Each

service, process or infrastructure component has a lifecycle, and service

management considers the entire lifecycle from strategy through design and

transition to operation and continual improvement.