Computer Services Management: Introduction and The Service Concept

Computer Services Lecture 1
Introduction and the

Management Service Concept
What are we going to talk about in this
course?
COMPUTER SERVICES 3 KEY WORDS

MANAGEMENT
• What is a service?
• What sort of services are we talking about
in CSM?
Some • Who is the service provider?
• For whom are the services? In other words,
important who are the customers or consumers?

• What do these customers want or need?
How do we find out?
questions • How to excel at our supporting these

needs? Why?
• What are the challenges? Internal and
external
Some key trends today…
• Almost all services today are IT-enabled, which means there is
tremendous benefit for organisations in creating, expanding, and
improving their IT service management capability.
• IT service management has become a key strategic capability.
• IT is now an integral part in the way organisations work and is

continuously transforming how organisations operate.
• Users have become customers

Defining Service
• Service
• A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers
want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks
• Service Provider
• Provides IT services to a customer within a business
• Service offerings
• A formal description of one or more services, designed to address the needs
of a target consumer group. A service offering may include goods, access to
resources, and service actions.
Service: Some facts
• Unlike goods, which have a physical presence, services are intangible.
• Services are difficult to define or measure.
• The perception of the service depends on a personal interaction between the receiver and
provider of services. It can be subjective.
• What are factors that affect the quality of the service offered?
• The concept of service levels, service level agreements (SLA) are tools to define the quality of
service expected
Service management
• A set of specialised organisational capabilities for enabling value for
customers in for the form of services. (source: ITIL edition 4)
• Developing the specialised organisational capabilities mentioned in

the definition requires an understanding of:
• The nature of value
• The nature and scope of the stakeholders involved
• How value creation is enabled through services
Computer Services: Class exercise
• Identify the different computer services in your company
• Map your computer services
• Include service dependencies and priorities
• Need to understand what is important internally and externally (generate
revenue or lose revenue)
• How can we use this information?
• Resource model and technology required in order to align your IT to our
business and ultimately improve our long-to medium term profitability
What did we find out?
Who are the
customers
and what are
their needs?
Who are they customers?
• These customers can also be referred to service consumers
• They derive value from the services offered. Value different things for
different people.
• The customers are mostly internal to the organisation

• HR and administration
• Product and sales
• All other departments
• Top level management is also a key service consumer
• External customers include partners and suppliers (can you name some
more?)
Example of customers using IT services
Internal External
Can you think of one? Microsoft partner is accessing the partner
portal to buy additional licenses.
Customer expectations and needs
• How do we find out?
• Top-level management will probably set the expectation in general which

will be generally in terms of cost, risks, impact and benefits to the business.
• Department heads will do the same.
• Organisation regulations and policies
• The challenge with these requirements is to transform them into actions

that can fulfil these requirements.
Customer expectations and needs
• Use of data gathering techniques (normally for end-users)
• In general, end-users have different and more simpler needs

compared to their department or organisation
• Some techniques that are commonly used are:

• Interviews / context inquiry
• Questionnaires
• Joint Application Development (JAD)
• Dialogue and observation of actual and potential users (perhaps the most
efficient)
Identifying and understanding what your
customers want
User centred Design
Persona User stories

Personas: High user satisfaction
• Transform audience users into usable personas
Persona: Example
Use user stories
• Bringing the power of story telling to understanding customer needs
• How the users work / behave with the computer system or expect the
computer system they are interacting with to behave
• Generally in the form of:

As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>
• For example, ”As a user, I want to save my rolling budget report so
that only me and my manager can open it”.
Customer satisfaction levels
• Directly related to the service offered and the value they perceive
• Why is customer satisfaction important?
• Devising metrics (mapping these metrics) that allow you to

understand customer satisfaction levels
• Can you state some metrics that can be used?
Capturing feedback from customers
• Suggestion box
• Questionnaires (face to face, phone, email, etc..)
• Feedback / evaluation sheets
• Focus group
• Interviews, workshops
• Complaint channel
• All the above have their strengths and weaknesses
• Key is the ability to map the data captured to reveal the satisfaction levels
of customers
Predicting customer needs
• Is there any value in predicting customer needs?
• Why and How?

Service relationship
• The concept of value co-creation
• Stakeholders across the service value chain contribute to the

definition of requirements, the design of service solutions and even
to the service creation and/or provisioning itself
• A cooperation between a service provider and service consumer.

Service relationships include service provision, service consumption,
and service relationship management. (ITIL v4)
Service provision
• Activities performed by an organization to provide services. Service
provision includes:
• management of the provider’s resources, configured to deliver the service
• ensuring access to these resources for users
• fulfilment of the agreed service actions
• service level management and continual improvement.
• Service provision may also include the supplying of goods.
Service consumption
• Activities performed by an organization to consume services. Service
consumption includes:
• management of the consumer’s resources needed to use the service
• service actions performed by users, including utilizing the provider’s
resources, and requesting service actions to be fulfilled.
• Service consumption may also include the receiving (acquiring) of
goods.
Service relationship management
• Joint activities performed by a service provider and a service
consumer to ensure continual value co-creation based on agreed and
available service offerings.
Operational excellence
• Why and how?
• Achieving desired outcomes requires resources (and therefore costs)

and is often associated with risks.
• Work in a way which is repeatable, can be improved continually

(usually incrementally) and predictable
Costs: Service consumer’s perspective
There are two types of cost involved in service relationships:
1. costs removed from the consumer by the service (a part of the
value proposition). This may include costs of staff, technology, and
other resources, which the consumer does not need to provide
2. costs imposed on the consumer by the service (the costs of service
consumption). The total cost of consuming a service includes the
price charged by the service provider (if applicable), plus other
costs such as staff training, costs of network utilization,
procurement, etc. Some consumers describe this as what they have
to ‘invest’ to consume the service.
Costs: Service provider’s perspective
• A full and correct understanding of the cost of service provision is
essential.
• Providers need to ensure that services are delivered within budget
constraints and meet the financial expectations of the organization
Risks: Service consumer’s perspective
• Two types of risk
1. risks removed from a consumer by the service (part of the value
proposition). These may include failure of the consumer’s server
hardware or lack of staff availability. In some cases, a service may
only reduce a consumer’s risks, but the consumer may determine
that this reduction is sufficient to support the value proposition
2. risks imposed on a consumer by the service (risks of service
consumption). An example of this would be a service provider
ceasing to trade, or experiencing a security breach.
Risks: Provider’s perspective
• It is the duty of the provider to manage the detailed level of risk on
behalf of the consumer.
• Depends on the context.
• The consumer contributes to the reduction of risk through:
• actively participating in the definition of the requirements of the service and
the clarification of its required outcomes
• clearly communicating the critical success factors (CSFs) and constraints that
apply to the service
• ensuring the provider has access to the necessary resources of the consumer
throughout the service relationship.
How to achieve operational excellence?
• There are innumerable challenges as we have seen.
• A mix of “Doing the right thing and doing thing right”
• Competencies, standards, best practices, principles and right set of

tools, organisation, leadership and people
Capability maturity model for software
• The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a methodology used to
develop and refine an organization's software development process.
• A maturity model can be viewed as a set of structured levels that

describe how well the behaviours, practices and processes of an
organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes
(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model)
CMM
Source: https://cybersecex.wordpress.com/2018/12/21/capability-maturity-model-integration-cmmi/
References and Additional reading
• https://www.axelos.com/news/blogs/may-2019/itil-human-centred-
service-design

Computer Services Management: Introduction and The Service Concept

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Computer Services Management: Introduction and The Service Concept

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Computer Services Management: Introduction and The Service Concept

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Computer Services Lecture 1

Introduction and the

COMPUTER SERVICES 3 KEY WORDS

important who are the customers or consumers?

questions • How to excel at our supporting these

• IT service management has become a key strategic capability.

• IT is now an integral part in the way organisations work and is

• Users have become customers

• Developing the specialised organisational capabilities mentioned in

• The customers are mostly internal to the organisation

• Top-level management will probably set the expectation in general which

• Organisation regulations and policies

• The challenge with these requirements is to transform them into actions

• In general, end-users have different and more simpler needs

• Some techniques that are commonly used are:

User centred Design

Persona User stories

• Generally in the form of:

• Devising metrics (mapping these metrics) that allow you to

• All the above have their strengths and weaknesses

• Why and How?

• Stakeholders across the service value chain contribute to the

• A cooperation between a service provider and service consumer.

• Achieving desired outcomes requires resources (and therefore costs)

• Work in a way which is repeatable, can be improved continually

• A mix of “Doing the right thing and doing thing right”

• Competencies, standards, best practices, principles and right set of

• A maturity model can be viewed as a set of structured levels that

You might also like