Service Portfolio Management for Technical Services

[Mihai Kiss]

Hello,

The Service Portfolio Management as presented in CSDM 3.0 is directly linked to Business Services.

On the other hand the Sample IT service porfolio available in the instance, provides usable data, in the form of portfolios, taxonomy layers, and taxonomy nodes. The services that you would eventually define and structure under this portfolio can be only Business Services. On the the other hand, the existing portfolio contains nodes which seems appropriate for Technical Services, like: Software Support or Data Center Management.

Is there any best practice here or any plans to support / use a taxonomy for Technical Services as well?

Appreciate any hint on this.

Thank you,

Mihai

[Kristine Naess]

Hi Mihai,

Do you use IT Financials with cost model for invoicing your customer business units/transfer pricing units? If not, I guess you may implement your structure with tech services as top nodes along with business services if that's easier. If you are using TBM, on the other hand, you would want to achieve a structure more like this: 

 This means that the technical services are underpinning various TBM Business services, TBM End user services or TBM Shared services (all grouped in the cmdb_ci_service, with service classification Business service), either by supporting application services that are linked to business service offerings that again are linked to business services, or by having a business service as a parent service directly. It seems possible to do this both ways. 

The TBM taxonomy nodes provides a possibility to bench mark cost and view total cost of ownership across the organization. For example there may be many parts of the org that delivers Identity & Access management related services. TBM lets us view these together in reports in a standardized manner. But after our upgrade to Paris, we could no longer add TBM taxonomy nodes and Service portfolio directly to a service offering or technical service. So we had to create a business service record for each of our top level technical services where we could provide details on what portfolio and taxonomy node they belong to. Here we visualize this on our (DNB) services:

The TBM Business services are meant for the services that provide the income for your company. Being a financial institution, we utilize BIAN services as our TBM business services. But since we are a corporation/group, we actually also sell Platform services, Infrastructure services and various other IT Delivery services to other companies in our group. Since we have created (cmdb_ci_service) business services as parents for our (cmdb_ci_service) technical services, this suits us rather well. But it would have been nice to have the possibility to show cost stemming from an infrastructure service via a "true" business service in order to view the total cost of ownership for that business service. We haven't yet found a good way to do that. But we are looking into mapping cost from technical service offerings via application services and business service offerings to the "true" business services in reports. This would be easier with cost data from our cloud providers, since we tag infrastructure resources with the consuming application services. Exploiting dynamic CI-groups to maintain good data quality on those technical service offerings is a key success factor in this. 

Sorry for the messy explanation on how we have done this, but it sure hasn't been easy to figure out a better way. I would therefor be happy for all guidance on how others have done this.