IT Service Management – Unlimited!

Outsourcing: IT Service or ITSM Process..? December 8, 2008

Seeing the title, the very first question one would have is: Are they really different or aren’t they same? and the next one would be; Does it really matter if they are different?

For me, it never used to matter just because I never knew the difference in the first place! But once understood, a long time back, it helped me change my advisory approach for organizations who seek assistance in improving their ‘IT Service’ delivery.

We may have to keep the context of this topic to ‘IT Service’ and ‘IT Service Management Process’ alone. As going beyond this, makes the lines between ‘Process’ and ‘Service’ very blurred. Now, keeping ITILV3 definition as a reference, we all know that ‘IT Services’ are about facilitating (partial enablement) the outcomes that needs to be achieved by a business process of a customer (which are run by the customer himself) . And of-course without the Customer owning of specific costs and risks related to delivering that ‘IT Service’.

If we agree on the above statement, then there are many ‘Processes’ that a ‘IT Service Provider’ needs to manage  to deliver (plan, design, build, run and improve) this ‘IT Service’. Let us call them (the processes) as ‘IT Service Management Processes!. So, if the customer has not ‘Outsourced’ the ‘I’T Service’, then all the ‘ITSM Processes’ required to deliver this ‘IT Service’ should be managed by the ‘Customer’ himself; isn’t it?

Now this ‘Customer’ has a many choices on the ways of how he/she can ‘Outsource’ the ‘IT Service’.

• The complete ‘IT Service’ (all the elements including all ‘ITSM’ processes needed to deliver this ‘IT Service’)
• One or more of the ‘ITSM processes’ needed to deliver the ‘IT Service’ (but not all of the required processes for a single service) or;
• Just the Knowledge/Skills needed to carry out one or more steps of the ‘ITSM processes’ (again one or more)

The first case is like the ‘IT Service Outsourcing’ (the real ‘IT Service Provider’ like), second is more like a IT Service Process Outsourcing (BPO like) and the third, a IT Service Process Knowledge Outsourcing (KPO like).

Now, at least in India, there are many so called ‘Remote IT Infrastructure Management Service Providers’ (a variant of the External Service Provider type as per ITIL V3) who always believe that they deliver ‘IT Services’ to their ‘Customers’, where actually, most of them fall in the 2nd and 3rd category as defined above.

I feel they should keep in mind the relative difference between the above 3 and understand what they are into. This makes them define their Services better, understand what to agree, measure and improve. This differentiation will help them make use of best practices from other BPO and KPO organizations (non IT).

This will also help them really understand how to scope the ISO/IEC 20000 certification efforts. For example, if you are 2nd and 3rd kind, then only the internal IT Department of the so called ‘Service Provider’ can be the scope of certification and not the Process or Knowledge delivery business of the Provider be the scope.

I believe that understanding of these subtle differences can make life better and simpler for one as a ‘IT Service Provider’ and better manage the customer perception and satisfaction.

What do you think?