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May 26, 2010
Why the Business is the primary customer of Service
- an ongoing running operation,
- that is presented to a consumer of the operation's output,
- with an offer and a mechanism (interface),
- for invoking the delivery of the output upon the consumer's occasion of demand.
The reason why this arrangement can actually work without imploding is three-fold:
- the provider of the service can share terms of agreement with the consumer about the allowable occasions of demand;
- the full range of operation outputs need not be offered as a service; and,
- the consumer need not know how the operation is constructed or maintained, so the provider can modify the operation behind the service.
In effect, it is do-able because the scope of the service can be managed.
Typically, it is the issue of operational modifications that generates the most excitement -- and the excitement typically comes to a head in the IT (and facilities) departments of the business. Levels of service, and qualities of service, are bound to managed risk and performance factors that must be aligned to each other within the architecture of the operation that will be exposed as a service.
To add further perspective: it really does go without saying that different tools may be employed to do the same job; and this points out that deployment decisions are more critical to risk and performance than are the attributes of the tools themselves. With that perspective, a "business view" of an operation concerns itself primarily with the possibility that operation structures are both rational and sustainable. This means, in turn, that the business view of how to reasonably warrant a level or quality of service relies mainly on two things:
- it looks at those same operational decisions
- it acquires a validation through test-and-proof that the outputs for offer are acceptable, within the risk and performance allowed by the decisions.
This structural coherency sought for operations is essentially what is pursued by the prescriptive practice called Configuration Management. Configuration Management is historically maturing within the domain of IT software and hardware management for integrated production systems. Today it is most heavily influenced by best practices described in the knowledge domain called IT Service Management, or ITSM.
From the above notes, however, the emphasis would appear to be not primarily technological but instead concerned with the decisions (left side of the illustration), underpinning the business information model and business process model (right side) that together shape those outputs of the operation that are eventually made selectively consumable.
Where technology takes root, through IT architecture, is in operationally instantiating the service -- to meet a quality and level that works for the business. Primarily, the service must, on demand by the business, be available within the rationality and sustainability that the business can accomodate. In that sense, the first customer of the service is the business itself.
The net of this is that the IT practice within the business will need to understand and mature configuration management on business terms, especially in a time when systems management of IT-based operations is relocating outside of the business campus to what is called the Cloud -- managers of provision of web-based delivery of IT-systems-as-services. Although the Cloud is most often referred to as an "environment", its business role is that of a contracted service partner or supplier, conducting critical chunks of operations that must not disconnect from information and process management.
The takeaway: alignment of operations to information and process models will call on the ability to articulate how much configuration specification by the business is necessary for the business to achieve confidence in risks and performance levels, and thereby agree to the terms of service delivery.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 26, 2010 2:52 PM