How do Business Processes, IT Services, Business Services and Technical Services relate or not relate?

In my previous blog, we briefly discussed the role of business processes when it comes to aligning IT with the business. Let’s now further discuss how these business processes are related to business services.

A good non-IT example is of a restaurant. Think about the Menu. It is mostly put together in a language that customers are able to understand what dishes can be ordered and what to expect from each (a brief description). Now, imagine a restaurant that is serving a hotel; room service menu may be different from restaurant menu. Lets see some IT-related examples. When you ask for high-speed Internet service, you do not normally ask for the number of servers, routers, and other infrastructure components you need. On the other hand, if you are providing infrastructure services and your customers are really Application Service Providers or Application Development organizations, the business services may be more technical in nature.

The point that I am trying to make here is that business services are what your customers are able to relate to. What constitutes a business service depends upon what business you are in and who your customers are. Remember the restaurant example. Their end customers are those people who come to the restaurant to have dinners and lunches. But these restaurants are themselves someone’s customers e.g., those parties that provide ingredients for example. Therefore, business services presented to the customers will vary depending on your particular business and your customer segments. Note that there may be more than one business services required in order to enable a given process and business services may be shared across a range of business processes. Note that both business services and IT services are types of IT services.

Technical services realize business services. Technical services, as the name suggests, are internal facing and are not normally visible to the customer. One or more technical services may be required in order to realize a given business service and technical services may be shared across multiple business services. Continuing on the same high-speed Internet service example. Some of the technical services that realize this High-Speed Internet service may involve Connectivity, Web Server Hosting, FTP, and other technical services and these may be shared by other business services as well.

We have defined the business services and technical services above. So, you will ask me what I think about IT services then. Well, both business services and technical services are types of IT services. Former is higher-level, business-focused, customer-friendly, and comprises of one or more technical services and the later is inward-focused (for the consumption of IT developers and manager), technical in nature, is largely shared and / or re-used to support other business services.

Why should I care about business processes when realizing ITSM?

A business exists because it creates and delivers its core products and services that are needed by its customers to achieve their respective desired outcomes. For an automotive industry, these products are cars and other automobiles, for banks, it may be a range of banking products and services such as personal accounts, mortgages, personal loans, and so on. The activities and steps that need to be executed in order to develop and deliver these products/services are logically grouped into business processes. Those processes that result in the creation of core business products and/or services are called business processes. The more efficient the business processes are, the greater throughput the business will have thereby increasing its profitability. Before the emergence of the Information Age, businesses used other means to improve their productivities. In recent years, emergence of Information Technology and the Internet created tremendous opportunities for the business leaders and entrepreneurs to exploit these new channels to transform their business processes and introduce new ones. eBay, Amazon, Google, and almost all financial services companies and many others are great examples of those companies in which business is IT and IT is the business. These and other similar companies have exploited IT to the point that IT is integrated into their respective business processes.

Therefore, although business processes are not something new, the inter-dependencies between the success of the business processes and the effective delivery of IT services is definitely something new. In case of automotive industry, raw materials include the automotive parts (engine, transmission, body parts, electrical system, and so on) and the assembly line business processes consumes these parts to produce a complete operational vehicle at the end of the assembly line. Similarly, in the case of IT, the IT components (applications, software, hardware, servers, networks, and so on) are the raw materials that feed IT processes. The end result of these IT processes result in the creation of IT services. For these services to be valuable to their consumers, it is absolutely critical that these are aligned with the respective needs of the customers.

Using people, process, partners and products (tools), IT managers must link IT infrastructure components together to create the concept of an end-to-end IT services that enables the business processes.

In order for them to be valuable, the IT organization must learn to communicate in terms of business metrics and customer satisfaction. Not metrics but business metrics are critical in order to build awareness of all the value-add IT achievements.