ITIL Foundation : Service and Service Management

I get asked frequently what the difference is between a service and service management as per ITIL.

ITIL defines a service as a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

I have explained ITIL service earlier on Abhinav PMP. The explanation holds good today as well.

Service management is defined in ITIL as a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.

In short, managing the service is the essence of service management.

What goes into managing a service?

ITIL states that you need specialized organization capabilities that produces value to customers through services.

What are these organizational capabilities?

It consists of various factors that makes up the entire management structure that is necessary for delivering objectives such as :

– Management to govern and lead

– Organization to keep the flock together

– Processes to deliver on objectives

– Knowledge for performing the actual activities

– People to carry out process and functional activities

– Information to feed analytics

– Applications as a medium

– Infrastructure to host applications

– Financial capital for supporting all the above

When you have services that fall into IT domain, you will have IT service providers engaging in IT service management.

Official ITIL definition of IT service management is: IT service management is performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.

If you have more questions on these topics, you can jump onto ITIL and More facebook page and ask away.