What is a Business Service?

[pdavidson]

I'm starting to look at Business Services and their Service Offering records. I'm stuck on matching these SN records with the abstract ITIL best practices of Service Packages and Differentiated Offerings.

The ITIL best practice says a "Service Package" is made up of one or more Core Services, Supporting Services, and Enhancing Services. On top of this, the Service Package may have differentiated offerings that are catered towards specific customers and their needs.

My assumption is that the Business Service can be defined at either an individual Service level or as a Service Package. The higher level abstraction that Business Service is really about what the business processes are doing, like Sales, sort of blows my mind, and really doesn't seem to fit within the SN portfolio mold (almost like I'd have to build that higher layer first). So I'm gonna stick with Service level for Business Services....am I thinking clearly?

• Service Package example, "Getting Connected". This package contains lots of other services, like getting your device(s), accounts, network access, file storage, etc. The "Getting Connected" service package may have different Service Offerings, like Standard, Developer, Engineer, Scientist, and Executive.
  • I'm thinking that these Service Offerings for this Service Package could a reference to an Order Guide as the customer's interface on the Service Catalog
• Service example, "User File Storage", and this can have different Service Offerings (Standard, Premium, Executive).
  • I'm thinking these Service Offerings could reference to Catalog Items as the customer's interface on the Service Catalog
    
    

With the two examples above, this would mean I have a "Business Service" record for both the "Getting Connected" Service Package, and also for the individual service of "File Storage". Obviously the package is referencing the underlying Services.

Am I taking the correct approach here? Are Business Services the correct level of CI record for what I'm trying to do? If not, then what else is there? Copy the "Business Services" table and start making my own lower level abstractions to define individual Core, Supporting, and Enhancing Services?

[robpickering]

At a high level we've opted to use Business Services to define abstract concepts:   "Accounting / Finance", "Human Resources", "Communications", "Collaboration", "Computing Hardware", etc.

We use Service Offerings very deliberately to be anything that we want to be able to track availability, reliability, SLAs, etc.   Within ServiceNow Service Offerings can have SLAs for availability and have that availability automatically determined through the use of Outage records on that Service Offering.

If you hop into your development instance and actually create the examples found at the following link, you'll get a good feel for how ServiceNow uses Business Services and Service Offerings to provide a Service Catalog for end users to browse and understand:

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Business_Services_Catalog

Also good information here about tracking availability of a Service Offering:

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Service_Offerings

At a high level, Business Services organize similar service offerings together, so a "Service Package" in the strict sense.