How do you classify applications and services hosted / provided by third parties

[Aron Campbell]

Hi Everyone,

Our organisation like many others use a mix of applications that are managed in house, provided by third parties and managed as a service hosted from another data centre and in other cases just providing a service as as form of outsourcing.

I'm interested in thoughts on the third item (just providing a service)

Should this be considered as a form of Business Application or Technical Service.

We still want to track incidents, outages and service levels on this type of outsourcing because they are still important to smooth functioning of the organisation.

Ideas please.

Kind Regards,

Aron Campbell

[Stig Brandt]

Hi Aron

You need to look at:

- Business Application is an inventory, for all applications your company are using, no matter if there is a "service" around"

- Service (Whether technical or Business) comes into play, for a business application, when you are signing a contract, as in your example "outsourcing" - you have a contract with SLA's to take care of your Business Application.

When that said

- Your Business Application can be a SaaS, Onpremise - perpertual license model,  lease of etc.

- The Service is warranty, maintenance/patching, application development, hosting etc.

Best regards

Stig

[Aron Campbell]

Hi Stig,

Let me give some examples of a outsourced services.

1. We generate bank statements for customer accounts and they are stored by a third party.  We pay for outsourced statement storage.

2. We connect to a real time payment network sending payments via that network to other financial institutions. We pay for membership and connectivity.

3. Visa debit/credit card transactions are forwarded to us via a third party payment transaction processor from merchants.  

In these cases we don't know what the application is but care that the service is functional as our customers are impacted when they don't.

We still have to raise incidents and outages against those services.

Hope this clarifies the intention.

Regards,

Aron

[Stig Brandt]

Ok, I think you should have customer services depending on other services (Service Offerings), this model I did for a big MSP service provider.

This is though not described in CSDM :-(.

[Mark Bodman · Accepted solution]

The short answer is both still apply. 

At the Business Application level, these may be used by customers directly, or internal or a mix.  No matter what, you need to then define them.  When they are managed eternally, you will still have a record of them with the app owners, Capability perspective, descriptions, TCO, etc.  All the APM functionality applies.  What we commonly see is that IT may not support those Business Applications and the support group is eternal to the organization.  This then gets into the Service definition area for operational management...

Service (business, + Application Services) describes how those Business Application are deployed and consumed.  The Service Offering is also critical to describe SLA and usage criteria.  For on-premise, you may have have tangential layers of Technical Services too, but for out-sourced Business Application situations your support groups and services would be eternal.  Those need to be defined either way to have a well-implemented SIAM (Service Integration and Management) brokering capability, specially when there are no support teams within the organization and customers expect Service Management to seamlessly work in either internally hosted, or eternally brokered service situations.