What's an IT Service?
posted by Anna Mar, December 25, 2011It seems like IT people are always talking about services. There's IT service management (ITSM), Software as a Service (SaaS), Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) just to name a few common IT terms.
A service is a fundamental concept of information technology. Services can be used by customers, employees or partners. In other cases, services aren't for human consumption — they're designed to be used by computer programs.
There are three basic properties of a service:
- Services add business value.
- Services have contracts that describe how the service is used and what the service does.
- Services hide complexity from users (consumers).
Example
A sales organization wants their sales people to spend more time with customers. A service is launched that allow sales staff to access the organization's CRM with mobile devices.The business value is that sales people can spend more time with customers while still accessing critical sales data such as contacts, quotations, price lists and sales collaterals.
A contract is established that defines how to access the service, availability (i.e. 24x7), help desk support, etc.
The service hides the complexity of security, infrastructure, program code and service management processes from the user.
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