Product and Service

An observation from being an ITIL teacher is that a common challenge people learning ITIL face is the ability to differentiate between a product and a service. Typically these are folks from a software development and QA background and can only see the world through the actions taken to develop the application.

Let us consider a situation where the IT department develops and releases an application to the business. Now it is easy to consider that the application itself is all that is being provided to the customer. However, the application must also typically be maintained and supported for the customer. The factors involved in this are:

• help desk support


• incident and problem management


• regular contact with the customer


• evaluation and analysis of changes needed by the customer


• making the changes


• releasing the changed application to the live environment

Furthermore, proactive monitoring of availability, capacity, security and disaster recovery must also be performed to ensure that the agreed upon uptime of the application is maintained.

All these actions together provide the overall service for the application to the customer. The application as a product itself delivered to the customer is one thing. But the application functioning as it should at the agreed upon levels for the agreed upon period of time is quite another thing.

Therefore, we see the reason for processes like availability management, capacity management etc. Simply having a department of programmers is not enough as IT now requires the ability to handle all aspects of service provision to the customer. IT departments must evaluate the processes that are required for them to provide service to the customer and then set up and manage these processes within their department. Even programmers should at least be aware of the service aspects of the application being programmed by them.

Connecting with the customer

There are typically two situations when connection of an IT department with the customer at a significant level occurs. One when initial requirements are being threshed out and the other when there is a problem or issue that needs resolution. Organizations nowadays are relatively mature in their handling of the second situation where issues and problems are reported and resolved. This has been mostly due to implementation of incident handling and help desk processes and advents in help desk tools and applications. However, the interaction with customers during requirements is usually not handled very well. Furthermore, a more proactive approach to customer management is largely missing in most organizations.

The ITIL body of knowledge provides the Service Level Management process for exactly this purpose. The SLM process, which exists in the Design stage of the ITIL lifecycle, essentially performs two main functions:

• To determine the level of IT service needed by the business (customer) and


• To identify whether the required services are being met or not and if not, why not?

By the successful performance of these two functions, SLM helps to maintain and improve the IT service provided to the business. But more significantly, the SLM process and the Service Level Manager (the SLM process owner) create and maintain a relationship with the customer. It is through relationships that the ability to truly satisfy and even delight the customer can be achieved. The reason for this is that it is rare for the customer to truly understand what they want in technical terms. Therefore, they do not put down in a detailed requirement specifications document all aspects of what they want. The IT staff members following the spec document then faithfully produce a product or service that does not truly delight the customer but meets specifications. To truly understand the unstated and unspecified needs and desires of the customer, a relationship must them be established and maintained by the IT organization. That way, the customer can be guided into including, in a spec document, what they really want but are unable to put down specifically.

The service level manager, therefore, should have both technical skills and relationship skills which include communication and negotiation skills. The service level manager should also be able to act as an emissary for both sides, the customer as well as the IT service provider.

The SLM process consists of the following high-level steps:

• Cataloguing the services


• Implement Service Level Agreements


• Monitoring, reporting and review of actual service levels


• Review of Service Performance and adherence to SLAs


• Implementation of service improvements as needed

Of course each of these steps has several steps of their own and relevant inputs and outputs. However, it is by following these steps that an IT organization can ensure proper customer service in a proactive fashion.

The old style of informal and unregulated contact and interaction with the customer is no longer the appropriate method of carrying out business. Every IT department should have a formal point of contact with the customer(s) and a proactive process of ensuring service quality and constant improvement. There is no way of avoiding or bypassing this requirement any longer.