“Service” is in the Eye of the Beholder
One of the most commonly sought concepts in IT service management over the past decade has been service level management (SLM). Prior to widespread adoption of ITIL, SLM was most commonly associated with performance metrics for infrastructure elements (e.g., network devices, servers). Unfortunately, this perspective of SLM is wrong … well, it’s usually wrong.
What was (and often still is) wrong with this interpretation of SLM is that the ‘S’ was not defined according to the general interests of the service’s consumer. In fact, the service was usually arbitrary and related to infrastructure, not the consumer’s true desired service. This is akin to trying to measure the “nuts and bolts” of the service, not the service itself. Such an ill conceived perspective is wrought with all sorts of problems. As providers of the service, we must define the service according to what the consumer needs.
The main problem, of course, is the basic fact that an infrastructure metric may be completely irrelevant to the consumer. For example, an end user cares about an application’s behavior, not the behavior of the servers, routers, switches, storage, and other nuts and bolts buried beneath the surface of that application.
With the appearance of ITIL as a pervasive set of definitions, we are finally starting to view SLM, and indeed the whole notion of ITSM, with a more accurate view of the ‘S’ in both initialisms (acronyms are pronounceable – as in RAM). The service is defined by the requirements of the service’s consumer as something relevant to their own daily lives. ITIL v3 is very clear about this, as the service lifecycle is front and center to the whole service management pursuit.
We must always consider the services we provide to be consistent with end user needs. These needs are often in the form of application-based business services. Think about the scenario where an insurance adjuster in the field is using a tablet PC to assess damages from an automobile accident. The adjuster doesn’t care much about the memory utilization on the PC, or the throughput of the wireless network, or the configuration of the J2EE server with the custom application, or the SAP back-end software module, or the Oracle database buffer pool size. The only thing that adjuster cares about is the ability to complete the assessment as quickly as possible, so the policy holder can receive the necessary repairs to return to the road. There is only one true service mentioned in this scenario – the claims processing system used by the adjuster.
Do we in IT need to be concerned about all the nuts and bolts? Absolutely, however these elements are all in the realm of operational elements. Operational elements are the building blocks of the service that are hidden from the actual end user. This is the way it should be. We cannot burden the end users with the complexity of the service infrastructure. That’s our role in IT Operations. It is our job to insulate them from this dizzying complexity.
I ended the first paragraph by implying that an infrastructure focus is not always wrong. This is because the service, as defined by the consumer’s needs, is sometimes very tightly bound to the infrastructure. Recall the relationship of the consumer and the provider of the service. The consumer is not always a corporate business end user. Sometimes, it’s someone consuming the infrastructure service with the intent of providing yet another technology service to yet another consumer.
A good example of this is wide area network (WAN) services offered by the telecommunications service providers. If I am building an application-oriented enterprise service for my business consumers, I need WAN services as an element of that service. In this case, I now become a consumer of a service where AT&T may be the provider. The WAN service is very different from the service I provide, but they are both bona-fide services in the eyes of their respective consumers – and their respective providers.
This consumer-provider relationship is crucial to successful SLM and ITSM. After all, the consumer is your customer and if you don’t give customers what they need, they will seek alternate providers. Can you say, “Punitive outsourcing?”