Specialization and Coordination

The goal of service management is to make available resources and capabilities useful to the customer in the most usable form of services at acceptable levels of quality, cost, and risks.

Service providers help relax the constraints on customers of ownership and control of specific resources. In addition to the value from utilizing such resources now offered as services, customers are freed to focus on what they consider to be their core competence.

The relationship between customers and service providers varies by specialization in ownership
and control of resources and the coordination of dependencies between different pools of resources.

Business Processes

A process is a set of coordinated activities combining and implementing resources and capabilities in order to produce an outcome, which, directly or indirectly, creates value for an external customer or stakeholder.

Business outcomes are produced by business processes governed by objectives, policies and constraints. These processes are supported by resources including people, knowledge, applications and infrastructure. Workflows coordinate the execution of tasks and flow of control between resources, and intervening action to ensure adequate performance and desired outcomes. Processes are strategic assets when they create competitive advantage and market differentiation. As a result, business processes define many of the challenges faced by service management.

Value Composition

When looking to the value from the customer perspective, value consists of two primary elements: utility, and warranty. Utility can be expressed as fit for purpose and warranty can be expressed as fitness for use.

Utility is perceived by the customer from the attributes of the service that have a positive effect on the performance of tasks associated with desired outcomes. Removal or relaxation of constraints on performance is also perceived as a positive effect.

Warranty is derived from the positive effect being available when needed, in sufficient capacity or magnitude, and dependably in terms of continuity and security.

The value proposition

A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

Customers always seek outcomes, they don't want to be accountable for managing infrastructure. IT services satisfy customer goals and let them not to worry about risks correspond to delivering their goals.

Standards vs. Practices

Usually, IT service standards refer to the agreed and standardized processes and procedures for IT services. Whereas, IT service best practices refers to the acheiving of IT goals efficiently and effectively.

As an IT service provider, it is good to know both of standards and best practices, that is, standards answer "what to do" questions, and best practices answer "how to do" questions.

PDCA

PDCA reffers to Plan, Do, Check, Act. PDCA is an iterative problem solving approach that is usually used in process improvement activities, ITIL v3 service lifecycle is build based on PDCA approach.

For more information about PDCA, please visit the link below

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA

IT Service Lifecycle

As ITIL define best practices indicate, IT Service life cycle has five phases:

1. Service strategy
2. Service design
3. Service transition
4. Service operation
5. Continual service improvement