ITIL Service Strategy – Overview, Principles & Objectives
A strategy is a policy designed to achieve a major aim or a particular goal. Strategy is not only limited to the corporate world but comes into action in all the chapters of your life.
Service Strategy, which is considered to be the core of
ITIL service lifecycle, enables an IT organization to think and act in a strategic manner. It provides guidance for transforming the IT Service management, which is an organizational capability, into a strategic asset.
Why is Service Strategy important?
It is really important to understand the need for developing a service strategy.
- Think about the time and money an organization puts in gaining a customer’s confidence. A strategic plan has to be in place to retain these customers to ensure that the invested efforts and dollars are not wasted due to customer’s defection
- If the service delivery is consistent and valued by the customer, he will definitely refer others to your business adding extra revenue to the organization.
- It helps an organization to gain their customer’s confidence and loyalty by constantly meeting their business needs. The customer continues to do his business with your organization despite of competitive offers from your competitor’s
Service Strategy - Overview:
The Service Strategy process does a thorough assessment of the business needs and the current market condition and then creates a plan or strategy, which is flexible enough to sustain this ever- changing market conditions.
- It defines a strategic approach for IT Service management and supports the organization to deliver and manage the IT services as per customer’s needs
- It provides the competitive capability to the organization to respond to the ever-changing business environment
- To bring maximum Return on investment, it knows how to prioritize the service request
Key Principles of Service Strategy:
Service Strategy – the phase in the
ITIL lifecycle is accountable to define the service value. Below are the key principles which a strategist must keep in mind before defining a service:
Value creation:
- An organization need to define as how the IT service will add value to the business requirement
- The value which is defined by the customer, changes over time based on how far the objective is achieved
Assets/Resources/Capabilities:
- The stuffs that will help an organization to deliver the IT service
Utility
- The functionality that is offered by the IT service to meet business needs
Warranty
- An assurance that a reliable and secure service is offered
Governance:
- It deals with how we implement and follow the defined strategy, processes and strategy
Patterns of Business Activity(PBA)
- The repeated activities in an organization like regular server load or monthly utilization of database space needs to be documented
Objectives of Service Strategy:
What is the most important objective of Service Strategy? It’s very simple. Just to identify the competitors in the market and deliver a service that is better than theirs. In order to do so an organization needs to design a strategic plan to achieve their objective.
Few other objectives are:
- To provide a detailed understanding of what strategy is
- Identify IT initiatives that support business goals
- Define the approach to deliver the strategic plans
- Transform IT organization into a strategic contributor to business success
- To understand the definition of value as per business needs
- Supply a “service provision model” that understand the organizational capability of delivering and funding the service. It identifies the customer to whom and how the services will be delivered
Service strategy is not just a plan, but a framework that enables an organization to provide an exceptional approach to deliver an improved value.
Author : Deepti Masand
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