What Makes Something a Service? (2024)

Definition of a Service

The ITIL books officially define a Service as, “A means of delivering value to Customers by facilitating Outcomes Customers want to achieve without [taking on] the ownership of specific Costs and Risks.” Services differ from products in that they don’t always provide something tangible with which you can measure whether that Service meets your needs.

Service Analogy

To better understand what a Service is, think about a restaurant vs. a supermarket. Both provide food, but you are buying a Service from a restaurant – namely, you want to be fed. At a supermarket, you can only buy the raw ingredients, which you put together yourself. With a restaurant, a Service Provider puts everything together for you. They have to worry about the specific costs like ingredients, glasses, tables, chairs, rent, salaries for management as well as the wait staff, etc. All you have to determine is whether the price of the menu items is worth it for you to eat there and not have to cook.

The Service Provider also takes care of the environment and ambiance – your overall experience. They refill your water glass, deliver your food and drinks, and take care of any issues along the way. Don’t like your meal? No problem. It’s the job of your Service Provider to make it right, whether that be by offering you something different, re-cooking the same dish, or refunding your money. That’s what it means to be able to transfer the risk of that Service. The Service Provider is going to waste some amount of food during the week and has to figure out how to work that amount (along with all of their infrastructure costs) into pricing on the menu.

IT Services

This same concept applies to IT Services. Customers come to you because they can’t or don’t want to have to worry about managing infrastructure (hardware, software, employees, data, changes, etc.). They want to pay one price for a Service and have you take care of it for them.They also want to transfer the risk to you. When something breaks, they want to be able to call someone who will work quickly on their behalf to resolve it.

Services as Outcomes

Another way to think of a Service is by looking at the outcome. What you want as a customer is to be fed (without having to cook or do any dishes), and hopefully have an all-around nice dining experience. Thus, the Service IS the outcome.

With an IT Service, for example, people don’t necessarily buy email. They buy the ability to be able to send cheap written communication to colleagues, customers, whomever. If you want to get a better handle on a particular Service, look at it from the perspective of what it allows your customers to do. If you’re still having trouble, ask your customers how they use your Service and what value it provides them. This exercise will give you a much clearer picture on the outcome of that Service. Taken one step further, you can do this exercise with all of your Services to design a pretty great IT Service Catalog (more on that here).

Erika Flora, PMP, CSM, and ITIL Expert is a Principal Consultant (and a bit of a Seinfeld fan) at BEYOND20. You can follow Erika on Twitter and join BEYOND20 on Facebook and Youtube.