Digital Products - replace or complement apps and services?

[Miklos Palfi]

Currently we are working on introducing the digital products concept into our data model. There are some very valuable contents out there on the topic including the recent Digital Services Forum meeting Digital Product Management & Foundational Data - Recorded April 11th 2024 

Our main question is the change from services and applications to digital products.

IT4IT v2.1, ITIL4 and TBM - in our opinion - all build heavily on the service portfolio and hierarchy. IT4IT v3.0 tries to make a step in the agile / DevOps direction (and comes with that closer to DevOps / SAFe world) by replacing the services and applications with products. (This was also well discussed in a previous Digital Services Forum session: 

IT Operating Models of Tomorrow - Presented on May 23 2022 

But how can we keep compatibility to the current models and frameworks? Shouldn't we keep the services and applications layer (not only the offers/service offerings) as a second view? What about putting the services and applications under the products as child-objects/tables? Actually we also sync many of our applications into the service table, because that's what customers (and the business users) know and name for the servicedesk.

So the question is replace or complement apps and services with digital products in the data model?

[Miklos Palfi]

Here is a picture from the IT Operating Models of Tomorrow - Presented on May 23 2022 

One of the participants placed the similar question to Mark Bodman at 20:00-25:00min

[Fred Jonkhart]

What we have seen is that business applications no longer is enough. Looking at the complete portfolio of products IT delivers we have now distinguished 3 main groups; applications, platforms and building blocks. I see Digital Product not as a replacement of (business) applications, but a higher level of abstraction to be able to include these other product categories as well. Based on the IT4IT and Mark's addition of Factory Automation I created the following picture.

What I find confusing about CSDM is that Product Model and Business Application are separated. I expect a complete product portfolio overview with all products, including applications. Then I would expect Digital Product Releases to represent specific versions throughout the product lifecycle (SDLC area?), and Digital Product Instances to represent factual applied products in the field (to replace Application Service and called System in the CSDM 5 picture).

[Miklos Palfi]

What you wrote ("I see Digital Product not as a replacement of (business) applications, but a higher level of abstraction") does resonate with what I see. I see the Digital Products also as a more generic object, maybe a bundle [of app, service, hardware and sometimes project/small enchancement], where sometimes the application is the most important, sometimes it is only a pure service without an application.

And as Mark Bodman said (see the "it operating models of tomorrow" video on youtube - at 23:08): "Am I replacing everything? Not necessarily but in some cases where you already copy your applications into your business [service] table you're doing it already", "it is kind of saying [Business Application] equals [Business Service], but when you have something separate that's where it becomes confusing for your consumer, [they] know the applications they are using but when they look at the service they're not sure which service [..] to choose."

This is exactly what we also have, we actually import the applications in a custom subtable of the services (instead of the business_applications table), because that's what the customers know. We try to move away from this by using the application service objects, but it is a longer journey.

I completely agree with the participant asking the question in the video: "so what I'm trying to understand is the product: is that just an abstract concept or is [..] it replacing or you're adding another layer of abstraction on top."

[Miklos Palfi]

Just received this link about the Digital Portfolio Management and CSDM Overview.

What is called Personal Portfolio is more or less what I would call a Digital Product: a set of applications, service offerings and application services (aka. system/digital product instance/environment) and the Owned by would be the Product owner.
https://youtu.be/EbuHgr10P98?feature=shared&t=699

[Miklos Palfi]

Currently we have no separate portfolios for external (customer) and internal (employee) services, all those are business services (with business applications) in our specific model.

Shared / Foundational / Factory automation are in our terms the base and technical services (with IT supporting applications like all DevOps tools, cloud management apps, automation, monitoring etc.) Attached is a draft model on which we are working. We have some slightly different naming, but the majority maps quite well to the standard model.

We call the Application Services simply "Environments". They could be named in the future Systems or Digital Product Instances (actually we called them earlier Application Instances...)
APM, SPM and PPM is done in two other different products, but the objects are daily synced into ServiceNow.