The definitive truth? Business Capabilities vs. Business Services

[Daniel Carvalho]

Hello All

The document "Application Portfolio Management (APM) Product View and use cases for CSDM V3" brings us a very straight forward and hard-put definition:

Frequently Asked Questions
• What is the difference between a Business Capability and a Business Service?
Business Services are what IT provides to the customer, while Business Capabilities describe what the business does.

But, so far, all available examples are very ambiguous:

HR Business Service Example - Onboarding

Finance Business Service Example - Financial accounting

Health Business Service Example - Registration

By simply reading "Onboarding", "Financial accounting" and "Registration" I really can not rest 100% sure that those represent "things" that IT provides to the (internal) customer (and/or user).

It could be a matter of language barrier, but the semantics of those examples seems more prone to the meaning of "business processes / business functions" then of "IT resources / IT data processing features/capacities".

Can someone help on setting a definitive understanding on this best-use approach (according CSDM) of root cmdb_ci_service?

Cordial

Daniel

[Mark Bodman]

There are indeed differences in definition and semantics given the origin and use of the Business Service vs. the Business Capability.  To start with, you need to look at where in CSDM each is depicted. 

Business Capability is a Design domain concept, often used by business and enterprise architects to describe what the business does.  This article explains the use in our platform and industry sources for creating capability models such as APQC.  This may not align with consumption of IT, or your customers. 

Business Services are what business consumes from IT, and often defined by IT organizations, not business to manage SLA's and commitments to service.  I have likewise seen businesses define Business Services using a similar source as for Business Capability.

Since a Business Capability can exist without any IT involvement whatever (though becoming more rare) there is a need to establish both for now.  Also, the Business Capability is more used to invest / dived in business units or plan acquisitions, this is a more strategic business point of view.  Here is an article I published on Business Capabilities that might help.

In a more mature organization I would venture to say that the Business Services and Business Capabilities are similar in many respects.

[kjh1138]

Probably a topic for another thread but am I alone in finding the definition of Business Service in ServiceNow counterintuitive?

Intuitively, it would seem that (ignoring recursive relationships):

IT produces->

Technical Services -which support->

Application Services-which enable the Business to produce->

Business Services->for the Customer

What is the ServiceNow term for services the business provides to the customer?

[Daniel Carvalho]

Hi 

I feel the pain you seem to be trying to approach, but the use of the term Customer gets in the way, since it could  throw us under the CSM and customer relations domain.

For the moment I prefer to keep talking about "enterprise end user" realm.

And having this considered, cutting from the previous text:

"Application Services-which enable the Business to produce->

Business Services->for the "... END USER

 Business Services would have a similar meaning to Business Process. And that is right about the same approach being discussed here indeed.

I (still) have difficuties perceive "Application Services (as one applicantion instance like myERP-PROD) > (leading to) > "A SOME OTHER ONE THING IT SERVES" (as for one Business Services ) "

Cordial

Daniel

[kjh1138]

Makes sense.

This also aligns with how we're doing it in practice where Business is a catch-all for 'not IT'. 

In regards to Business Process we've been using it in the sense of:

Service -supports-> Business Process -realizes-> Business Capability

Service -enables--> Business Capability

'enables' is a pre-CSDM artifact and needs to be updated to 'provides', but the basic idea is that Business Processes are a 1:1 relationship with organizational groups whereas Capabilities are generic across the enterprise.

[alexrozov]

ServiceNow are saying the business is consuming business services.

In that regards I think we should be able to distinguish between business services that are consumed by the "enterprise end user" and business services that are consumed by the "enterprise customer"

I would assume that as CSDM evolves we might see 2 "consume" parts to CSDM where one is internal to the enterprise (there we will see mainly IT and GR workflows) and the other is external.

the internal consumed services should support the external services while the external services would be tightly integrated to the customer workflow domain

and then we will need to map how different internal services support external services.

If we look at an HR example of onboarding - this will be internal and will not support any external services.

but if we look at a CRM service this service can be consumed by internal end users from the customer support division and it can support an external service the company is providing for it's customers. 

and both these services support a business capability of "providing service to our customers"

and we still need to figure out how and where to add the business process 🙂