ISO 20000: What is a “service”?

According to the ISO/IEC 20000, a “service” is a means of delivering value to the customer by facilitating the results they want to achieve without having to assume certain costs and risks.

Examples of some IT service providers include:

• Internet providers;
• Software factories;
• Labor outsourcing;
• Document safeguards;
• Application management;
• Data centers, etc.

In other words, everything that the customer acquires as a service without incurring, in many cases, the costs of equipment, hardware, licenses, etc.

In this sense, the customer is avoiding certain costs and possibly unwilling to assume certain risks.

Problem-solving and business support, strategies, and operations are increasingly based on the form of services.

In other words, the popularity of service sharing and outsourcing has contributed to the increase of new service providers, including internal units of companies.

This, in turn, reinforces the practice of service management and at the same time, imposes greater challenges on IT and the business.

Therefore, consider also the use of other business assets as a means of generating value, subject to the various limitations of the company.

A “service” ends up eliminating some of these internal restrictions, such as financial constraints; high initial investments in equipment; and physical constraints, such as workspace.

And even more, such as organizational constraints, i.e., without prioritizing the management of new services; policies; human resources, and any other limitation that prevents the performance increase of these assets.

Items of an IT Service

In summary, a “service” is composed of various components and attributes, distributed as follows:

Information System

A “service” is complete only when there are people to perform actions, processes that define the steps and activities, the technology used to generate value for the customer, and partners as one of the items that will facilitate the alignment between IT and the business.

Support

A “service” is composed of attributes regarding records and change control, plans, and restoration in case of failures, maintenance and support processes that must ensure performance according to what the customer defined and agreed with Information Technology as minimum requirements.

Quality

“Services” must meet other quality attributes, mainly emphasizing their availability when needed. That is, the ability to produce what was planned, to perform as established, above all, it needs to be a secure service with future scalability capacity.

In short, it needs to have a plan for portability and be easily adjustable to new needs, among other attributes that have been specified and agreed upon for information systems.