Entry #3

What is a service?

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. - Office of Government Commerce. (2007). The Introduction to the ITIL Service Lifecycle Book. The Stationery Office.

In the last quarter of a century, Information Technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. IT Service Management (ITSM) which is underpinned in time by the developing technology, inherently evolved too. Initially IT was primarily focused on creating, developing, and maintaining applications. Channeling the benefits of these newer technologies meant concentrating on delivering the applications as a part of a larger service offering, supporting the business itself.

My first tryst with IT Service Management began in mid-2008 when I started to serve as consultant for an US-based MNC in the Healthcare domain. I was primarily working on the BMC Remedy tool (do not remember the version now) and was dabbling my fingers in the domains of Incidents, Service Requests, Change Requests and Problem or if I were to use the ITIL v3 jargon – working primarily on Service Transition and Service Operations. While 2008 saw me taking baby steps into the world of SLAs, KPIs and L2/ L3 calls, 2009 saw me progress to Weekly SLA review calls, Monthly review calls, creating Known Error articles and sharing nuggets of IT Service Management gyan with the new joiners in the team.

And that was the background to why my manager proposed the ITIL certification for me. However, in the end, I did not do the certification in 2009 or even 2010 for that matter, although I continued working in the ITSM domain.

P.S. "The purpose of Best Practice is not to find the perfect solution, the best practice that can be lifted intact from a hotel and put to work in a steel plant. That rarely happens. The purpose of Best Practice is to disturb you with new ideas and insights." Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions by Arthur Andersen, Robert Hiebeler, Thomas B. Kelly and Charles Ketteman. Simon & Shuster 1998, p.28