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

Aron Campbell · ‎08-12-2020

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

Mark Bodman · ‎08-12-2020

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.

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Aron Campbell · ‎08-17-2020

Thank you Stig and Mark,

Very helpful.

Kind Regards,

Aron

Stuart J · ‎03-30-2022

If there is a Service consumed by the Business Users in the form of a "SaaS" offering, I can understand the need for a "Service/Service Offering" but do you recommend that you also create a Business Application and an Application Service to link them all together ?

If the Service that has been outsourced is something like "Travel Booking Service", you may not know or care what the underlying application/software is, you are just directed to a 3rd party site to book your tickets