Should End-user services be recorded as Business services?

[Robin Chytil]

HI Mark and all,

Quick question that I have not seen clearly explained neither discussed in this forum (let me know if I missed it):

At a customer, we try to align as much as possible to TBM and CSDM. We defined Business services for the Business divisions (Finance, Sales&Marketing, R&D, etc.).

I am clear on defining Technical services such as "PC support" (or even "Laptop support" and "Desktop support" if required), "Compute hosting", "Cloud hosting" or "Service Desk", which are Support, Delivery and Infrastructure services provided by IT in the background (and supporting Business services).

But what about services provided directly to End-users (called "End-user services" by Gartner and "Workplace" in TBM), such as "Office PC", "Video conferencing" or "Email". Should they be considered as Business services or Technical services (consumed by "Technology Consumer" as depicted in the CSDM v4.0 schema)?

I would tend to advise to keep them as Business services, can you confirm?

Robin

[Robin Chytil]

Thank you all for your replies and information you provided.

I watched (again) the youtube video with David Thigpen and Mark Bodman, they speak about this topic in their video (at around 19'00"): https://youtu.be/jWfwTHTLlzI?t=1121

So, in a nutshell, as there are subscribers to end-user services, they should be considered as Business services. On the other hand, "Laptop support" and "Service desk" must be considered as Technical services, even if end-user "use" these services, as they are "building blocks" required to deliver various business services.

Robin

[EricDohr]

A good gut check I use is a test of "Can I associate a Dynamic CI Group" to this offering?  If that is the case, I lean towards a Technical Service and corresponding offerings.

For example, if you have the following, you could naturally create Dynamic CI groups with the appropriate logic

• Personal Computer Management (Technical Service)
  • Personal Computer Management - Milwaukee (Offering) - contained by a Dynamic CI Group "Personal Computers - Milwaukee"
  • Personal Computer Management - Chicago (Offering) - contained by a Dynamic CI Group "Personal Computers - Chicago"

Huge win doing this way is then you can also use the Technical Service Offering and the relationship Manages::Managed By to the Dynamic CI group to keep group information on the CI records in sync.

[Barry Kant]

To add on Eric's feedback, which I would do as well, I also related the Dynamic CI Group to a Business Service Offering. (why not?)
it is a bucket of related CIs to be consumed by audience. (so business consumption as well). And yes it is supported as well. 
To add to Matthews comment:
a logic that is not visualized in CSDM is the depends on relations between Business Service Offerings and Technical Service Offerings. That was part of Service Owner Workspace and is part of Digital Portfolio Management. 

This is very handy to decompose your Business Service Offerings with underpinning Technical Service Offerings. 
Within incident mgmt you can use this to narrow down the assignment group list to only the groups within these related Technical Service Offerings (as according to the decomposition that is the chain of support)

BR,

Barry

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for the reply and what you say makes sense. The difficulty I have had in pulling CSDM apart is that it's clearly called out that Technical Service Offerings should only be consumed by Technology Consumers (basically Service Owners or someone building a Service from underlying infrastructure). Any Service that is consumed by business consumers should be represented by a Business Service offering within the Sell/Consume Domain. The SPM Foundation and Service Portfolio Management SLA Commitments (com.snc.service_portfolio.sla_commitment) plugins, together with the chosen field on IPC to represent the offering automates applying an SLA to an Incident based on the offering > commitment(s) (type = SLA) > SLA Definition(s) chosen. Hence my confusion where in the case of a service desk service where the CI is an end user device managed by a Dynamic CI Group, there is no route on the CSDM map from here to get to a Business Service Offering without going through a (non-existent) Application Service.

As I mentioned on a previous reply, you either ignore Business Service Offerings and only refer to Technical Service Offerings, or you need a link directly from Dynamic CI Group to Business Service Offering for those specific services where an Application Service does not apply.

I guess my point is that the CSDM is prescriptive but doesn't seem to cover such situations and again why I believe there's a gap in the CSDM 4 diagram - it only really makes sense for services that have an Application Service and Business Application directly attached. In your diagram above modelling TBM, I'm struggling to understand how Service Desk and IT Training can possibly be Technical Services - they're almost entirely consumed by business consumers. And Service Desk is most definitely an End User Service you'd expect to find in a Business Service portfolio.

Again, any insights you are able to provide would be appreciated.

[Barry Kant]

Hi Mathew,

the Dynamic CI Group class is extended from the Application Service class. 
So technically it is similar. I think the missing part is useful examples. In my opinion it fits the model for consumables. I link them both way:
Business relation as well as Technical relation. I couldn't see why not.
you could argue if that is over complicated, but I stick to the concept to use Business to track business and use Technical to track supportability/delivery

BR,

Barry