Business Service Offering and Application Service Relationship when regarding support services

[DonnaOlsen]

I am setting up application support services (ex, Service Desk) as a Business Service Offering under a larger application support parent service.   The service offering has a relationship to the application service that it supports, and I am questioning the depends on: used by the relationship between the two. The support service offering is not necessarily dependent on the app service, but a relationship is needed for proper filtering.  What are your thoughts on this relationship? Is there something else I should be looking at or is this acceptable?

Example:

Service: Application Support

Business Service Offering: ADP Support

Application Service: ADP Production

[Michael Dul]

Hi Donna,

What you are describing resembles Technical Service, and Technical Service Offering rather than the business one. Business Service (and Offering) should depict the aggregation of technology and contextualisation of those into End Customer Consumed service. A typical case however in lower maturity models is that there is a perception from IT that what they offer are applications, so the application portfolio is depicted in the Business Service layer.

I would suggest the following:

Service: Application Support

Technical Service Offering: ADP Support

Application Service: ADP Production

And with time you can have a Business Offering: e.g. Payment Processing which depends on ADP Production. (Please note I don't know what ADP Application does).

At this stage, from what you are describing, I would not venture into Business Services and focus on the Walk aspects of the model.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Michael

[DonnaOlsen]

Yes, it does sound like that, but we would like these to be customer-facing facing which is why they were placed into Business Service Offerings (this is an IT for IT model as well)

[Mathew Hillyard]

HI @DonnaOlsen,

Technical Services are still customer-facing, it's the context of the customer that is different.

• Business Services potentially face off to business customers - which in theory could be anyone in the organisation.
• Technical Services typically face off to technology customers only - in the CSDM world this could be explained as people who are involved in building or maintaining services.

However, from a service portfolio perspective it can equally be argued that end user (and application) support provides technology rather than business support, and so the taxonomy of end user and app support services should belong in the Technical Service Portfolio.

Another good reason to consider this is that for Desktop support, where the connected CIs are desktops and laptops, which would normally be linked up to one or more Dynamic CI Groups, so as there is no true "application service" there is no way in the CSDM model to hook those endpoint CIs up to a Business Service Offering, which again points us towards them being managed as a Technical Service Offering instead.

This isn't a hard-and-fast rule; it's up to how the organisation wants to treat this from a portfolio planning perspective. I've seen customers connect Dynamic CI Groups directly to a Business Service Offering. 

In terms of the crossover with IT4IT, the CSDM Data Model Examples NowCreate asset contains translation between CSDM and other standards, including IT4IT (see slides 94-98).

I hope this helps!

Mat