Business services are the intangible value that a business provides to customers. They include both services that a business sells directly to customers (B2C) and services that it provides to other businesses (B2B). These include information technology, software, facilities, financial, and insurance services.
A service is a product or service that is delivered to customers in a standardized and recurring fashion, usually over a network. Examples of business services include computer software, telecommunications, and management services.
The benefits of sharing services
There are many advantages to implementing shared services, including cost reduction, improved service, better control and insight, and compliance. The primary benefit of sharing services is that it allows companies to achieve economies of scale by combining multiple functions into one organization or service provider.
Defining and Designing Business Services for Success
When designing Services, the first step is to understand your business context (environment) and the needs of the stakeholders. This includes both your internal customers and external stakeholders whose needs may not be apparent to your IT team.
Next, you must define your Service Value Proposition and Positioning in the market by engaging all the relevant parties. These include your customers, IT team, stakeholders, and the people who use your Services (including support staff, if any).
The key to successfully defining and designing Business Services is to have an understanding of how these Services are positioned in the market and what their potential profitability is. This will enable you to develop a detailed set of metrics that help you understand the impact of your Services to your business.
In addition, you need to understand how these Services fit together in your business. This will allow you to prioritize them and make the right investment decisions for your organization.
A key part of this process is mapping technical services to business services. This helps you give responders more context about incidents that affect a particular business service.
Mapping technical services to business services also makes it easier for non-technical stakeholders to track the status of business services that they care about. They can view the impacted business services on the status dashboard or see them listed in your service catalog/CMDB or other location.
Creating and Editing Business Services in ServiceNow
When you create a new business service, you must specify the name of the business service and the team that will own it. You can also choose a service type and specify the location of this service. You can also configure a status page that lists the impacted business services and the health, availability, and risk metrics of these services.
You can also rename a business service, change its status from closed to open or active, and delete it. You must be a manager of the team associated with this service to do these actions.
Using the Business Services page
The Business Services page shows you a list of all business, IT, and device services that your organization has access to. It displays basic info, the health, availability, and risk metrics for each of these services, and you can also delete or rename them.