The IT Skeptic - Comments for "What is a service?"

IT is often treated as a pure service, which it isn't

skeptic — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Both.

IT is often treated as a pure service, which it isn't. there are objects involved, which may be tangible only in a broad sense (e.g. the downloaded movies discussed above), but are nevertheless goods not services. So are all the asserts we manage and deliver, so are the software packages we deploy, so is a RFC...

In not too many years i suspect we'll revert to talking about product management, of which service will be one component

I've forgotten where we started

JamesFinister — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:09:35 +0000

Can someone remind me why all this matters? Was it simply that we didn't think ITIL had a good definition of service, or does the panel think that by getting a better understanding of where IT fits on the goods - services continuum changes our approach, and if so in what ways?

My ears were burning...

ianclayton — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:13:14 +0000

My ears were burning - the length of this thread is testament to why we in IT should be very careful about abandoning ITSM and embracing BSM. Thank you - all of you who are trying to apply the USMBOK. As an ex product manager I just had to revert to type and teaching when confounded by the ludicrous definitions of a service bandied about by IT folks and expert consultants. Once and for all - THINK CUSTOMER FIRST when trying to define a service. Also - as Ken says - place it in context - IT Service. This helps.

Then remember - as many tried to emphasize here - its work performed by one for another - a transaction that has legal standing. Check out your national or State statutes - its well defined. Then - think successful customer outcomes - or desired results of your customers. A service is a type of product. As for type - the classification spans a continuum not a spectrum - sorry - ranging from pure goods (tin of beans) to a service (lawyer, doctor, accountant?). The job of the product manager (service manager) is to understand how much human resource to include to meet the needs of the customer.

So simple. yet we struggle so much - why?

Just for fun - therefore an IT Service Manager (ITIL included) should know how to design a service, with just enough human resource and service support, to satisfy a customer. So why is this not taught!

Everyone - this is exactly what our industry should be discussing at conferences - before we talk about software, processes, maturity levels and the like. Thats all inside out thinking and as I have said all too often of late - a recipe for failing the customer. And this - was exactly why I wrote the USMBOK from a non-IT perspective as it helps us all understand that the reason we buy an expensive Dyson vacuum cleaner is the same as why we pay for certain IT services... there is a result in there somewhere.

Skep - please download latest ebook version - it has outside in service management updates that will help... you can get it here:

https://www.servicemanagement101.net/pages/downloads-home

struggling with all your examples

skeptic — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:48:05 +0000

I did say IT was refining existing bodies of knowledge. i never advocated going back to following them slavishly. I merely suggested learning more from them - or at least that is what i meant to mean. certainly, treating ITIL as the font of all SM wisdom is unhealthy.

I'm struggling with all your examples to see how they challenge the concept of product as a mix of goods and services. It seems to me IT is only unsettling to those who deny the continuum, who see services in a pure form. And I thought we got past that about ten comments ago. IT products include a tangible goods component. Your downloaded song is a good example. the recording is in its own way tangible. the service is the use of the song.

Likewise you'll need to enlighten me on how outsourcing violates inseperability OF THE SERVICE COMPONENT of the product.

Service desks bring about physical change in exactly the same ways as those classic SM examples: masseurs and car washes. Nothing new here.

IT does indeed live at the edge of some service concepts but I don't see it breaking them.

Hold on a sec

Visitor — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:08:38 +0000

"We in IT think we're inventing it but we're just refining a mass of IP."

Well, actually, we are. I'll explain in a moment.

"...the goods/services spectrum, intangibility, perishability etc are service management concepts three decades old..."

Boom. There's the problem.

This is a very old, and, believe it or not, very rich discussion. And without the context of the larger narrative, the modern day treatments are under-appreciated. I've long since toyed with the idea of writing a book on the discussion, colorful characters and all.

Take for example, Adam Smith. His book, The Wealth of Nations, has arguably done more to instruct, enlighten us about business and economics than any other. Yet he took a provocative stance when he distinguished between goods and services with the criteria of capital formation rather than production boundary. The output of services could not be stored in inventories or augment the stock of assets, so he deemed it "unproductive" labor (not to be confused with worthless).

He never describes services as "intangible", that happened later with Jean-Baptiste Say in Traite D'Econonie Politique. Say argues Smith as wrong, compellingly, but then makes an unfortunate turn with his choice of terminology. And he likely realized it, as he writes in a footnote:

"It was my first intention to call these perishable products, but this term would be equally applicable to products of a material kind. Intransferable would be equally incorrect, for this class of products does pass from the producer to the consumer. The word transient does not exclude all idea of duration, neither does the word momentary."

The renowned John Stewart Mill later steps in to defend Smith writing, "Productive labor means productive wealth." He argues that because wealth normally refers to only material products, broadening the definition to include human capital would create confusion.

The argument continues to this day, with many interesting turns. IHIP, for some strange reason, became a hardened criteria during the '80s and early '90s. (IHIP = Intangibility, Heterogeneity, Inseparability, and Perishability.) This might have lasted until the current day if it wasn't for...

The Internet and the emergence of IT.

Yes, despite Ian Clayton's admonitions, IT is reinventing new product management rules because it is breaking the old ones. IT Outsourcing, for example, violates the Inseparability clause. Airport and Hotel Kiosks break the ideas of Heterogeneity and Perishability. Because of IT, IHIP is no longer taught as dogma in the leading university graduate programs.

Because of IT, Intangibility emerges as an ambiguous and surprisingly limited concept, causing many other fields to think differently. In fact, many IT services key goals are to obtain tangible changes in themselves or their possessions. The tangible outcomes of such changes range from ephemeral to the irreversible. A high labor content does not necessarily render a service physically intangible. In fact, the role of service desk personnel in many service environments is to help bring about a physical change in customers themselves or in their possessions. Think GM's roadside assistance, Healthcare support services, as well as Dell's platinum support services. Remarkably, you can find a CMDB/CMS and SKMS in each of these environments.

A common exception to the generalization that all services are perishable (non-storable) is found among IT services where there is the option of recording video/music for later resale and reuse. The service provider’s output is durable and replicable, and the customer can enjoy the performance again and again. I can point to a form of this on my Playstation gaming console and home theater equipment, where I can similarly enjoy improvements to firmware and codecs with online updates; stored services I use at my need and convenience.

The debate is by no means settled. But it doesn't surprise me that the freshest thinking is coming from IT domain. If we simply settled on "long established" non-IT practice, then everyone on this board should simply be classified as "unproductive."

Insert punch line ...

long-established

skeptic — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:00:00 +0000

As Ian Clayton always does, i commend readers to the extensive body of work out there on Service Management. We in IT think we're inventing it but we're just refining a mass of IP. the goods/services spectrum, intangibility, perishability etc are service management concepts three decades old or more. I've spent an enlightening half-year exploring what's out there!! As you guys say, there may not have been much research on ITSM to date, but there is some on SM.

As Ian also points out, due to the fact that there is no real distinction between service and product, the long-established discipline of Product Management is equally applicable. In fact as you will note from some of the comments above, I'm trying to train myself to use "product" to mean a mix of goods and services, not just the goods bit.

Admirable

aroos — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:00:53 +0000

Charles

You did what I thought I should do, went and searched for research results. I think we should understand that this is a real scientific subject. The serice-product dichotomy has been replaced by a service-product continuum as most products are worthless without service.

"The dichotomy between physical goods and intangible services should not be given too much credence. These are not discrete categories. Most business theorists see a continuum with pure service on one terminal point and pure commodity good on the other terminal point.[citation needed] Most products fall between these two extremes. For example, a restaurant provides a physical good (the food), but also provides services in the form of ambience, the setting and clearing of the table, etc."

The citation is missing but I have learned this way back from Christian Grönroos. Here are some short clips from him. Listen, they are good. We are all in the hamburger business. http://www.hanken.fi/staff/gronroos/

Aale

Distinction still remains

JamesFinister — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:43:52 +0000

I'm still thinking all this through, so bear with me.

By commodity service here I'm thinking of a third party provided service that is generally reliable and predictable, and where the client has little or no control of the service levels but only of their level of consumption. Having said that I think it , and some of what follows, contradicts what I said in this thread back in May or sometime when I said a commodity service is easy to specify. It is in terms of "I'll have some of that please" but not in terms of what that means either in terms of the constituent parts or the value it delivers. Think a home broadband service, perhaps.

The service system distinction still remains I think. My client still has and needs an accounts payable service that can be described in business level terminology without reference to the underlying technology. In the bad old days in IT we wouldn't have been very aware of that. We would have known that it ran on this server, using that app and that's how we would have presented it to the customer - as a set of disparate systems. Our SLA might have talked about availability of the server in % terms, not aboput availability at the desktop. In recent years we've tried to stop thinking like that and instead tried to align with the business. So our SLAs has shifted to the users ability to carry out a specific business transaction. we can do that because even if we have external suppliers in the mix we have sight of the value network and can can exercise a degree of control, even if it is contractual rather than operational. And so we took responsibility for the overall service.

Here and now I have a client who delivers all their services to their internal users via the web. Currently all their applications are running at an external data centre under a traditional application support model, but it is already difficult to specify the overall service an individual will get. especially if they are one of the individuals dependent on a 3G service. From a user perspective the view is that this is a web service, and therefore it will just be there, 24x7. The customer view is slightly different, but related, they no longer want to allow individual business units to specify the service levels they get. Suddenly we are also back to a model where downtime between the data centre and the desktop is no longer seen as the IT departments concern*, only this time the business is driving that view. The difference is that the business now have a reasonable perception that their users will normally be able to access the internet.

Now move those applications to SaaS model and what value can the internal IT department add operationally? What do our SLAs now look like? Two years from now
can I make a meaningful commitment to my customers about the availability of their documents stored on Googledocs, or the availability of the virtual call centre we are operating?

The user is still getting a service, but are we still managing a service?

*Not strictly true currently because they can specify exemption from bandwidth throttling for certain kinds of traffic, but that is stilla bout dealing with a constraint rather than adding value.

Don't disagree

Charles T. Betz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:10:33 +0000

I don't disagree. Perhaps I'm just undergoing the same evolution in thinking that others such as yourself have already passed through.

So, "IT service management" is a dead end?

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

Not About IT...

kengon — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:47:02 +0000

Charles,

While I appreciate and like your comments overall, I don't think that adjusting the focus to IT service buys us anything useful. I always will want to start with service management as a whole, as it provides the best context to understand what the customer intends and is trying to accomplish. In no way am I advocating abandoning or avoiding the discussion of technology. I just want to see us have a proper context for how to hold and discuss it.

I think you do an outstanding job of considering the fit of technology with service. From what I read, for most people, the connection between service management and IT service management is a tenuous one at best. When given the choice, those who don't have your background will go back to their preoccupation with the gizmos in ITs magic box and completely lose the plot.

kengon

System vs. service

Charles T. Betz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:32:35 +0000

I went to Walter Library (a gorgeous building btw) at the University of Minnesota 2 nights ago and downloaded the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of "system" and "service."

What struck me about the two concepts was:

- A system is complete and sufficient unto itself. It exists independent of value or utility.
- A service is incomplete without a recipient; it is a potential or real relationship. Value and utility pervade most of the variant definitions (of which there were some 36 pages worth).

I don't know what you mean by "commodity" services but (as is frequently remarked) the commoditization dynamic in computing is ferocious; today's cutting edge program becomes tomorrow's library buried in the operating system.

Re: professional services. In an IT context, what value do they deliver? In most cases I can think of, the end value is a correctly functioning IT service that is optimized along some dimension (utility/warranty). The "value" of that system is the delivery of authoritative transactional control. So the IT consulting avenue is merely preparatory.

Now, if the IT consultant says "did you realize that this new capability could net you $MM over the next 2 years?" then I guess the definitional part kicks in - is this "IT" consulting or "business" consulting? But in general we don't see "IT" consultants able to contribute much along those lines without deep, deep domain expertise in a particular business context - domain expertise that (except in the cases of polymaths) usually comes at the expense of currency in "pure" IT skills.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

what do we mean by "IT"?

Charles T. Betz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:58:44 +0000

But is it possible that this is the essence of the IT/business divide? That longer term value chains such as the complete lifecycle of a customer, and the schemes to lengthen and broaden the activity in that lifecycle, are in fact and by definition "business" concerns?

I keep returning to the etymology here: Information Technology Service Management. The word "technology" has to anchor the conversation. Lots of discussions seem to have a subtext of "let's ignore that inconvenient word because it's geeky and business people don't like it, and it keeps us lower on the food chain."

The "technology" of "information" to me is not at all about computing architectures, Intel vs AMD or whatever. Instead, for me "information technology" very much centers on computing fundamentals like:

- first order predicate logic
- ACID theory
- Turing & von Neumann's work on computability & stored program architecture
- the role of information processing in the enterprise, pre-Turing, e.g. Babbage & all that preceded him back to the Mesopotamians.

And any discussion of "IT service" needs to be bounded by those fundamentals.

Recently I was asked on one of those silly "tell us about yourself" questions, "what 3 people would you like to spend time with, over all of history." I answered Turing, Deming, and Goldratt. Why were people so excited about seeing "Turing in hardware"? Willing to spend billions? And what does that fundamental excitement have to tell us today about the "value" of "services" platformed on "information technology"?

We all "know" the answers ... but do we? I think it's good to go back once in a while and look at the path that got us here, & reconsider whether we really do understand the journey we've been on...

PS "discreet" transactions imply things like banned substances or adult services... ;-)

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

State changes

Charles T. Betz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:14:27 +0000

I guess I'm getting hung up on McGoveran's definition of transaction: controlled state change on a domain with business rules defining what "integrity" means. I can think of a couple ways to stretch that definition into telecomm (the "states" are either "connected" or "not connected") but it just doesn't feel quite the same. Yes, of course the *record* of the call is a transaction... but one doesn't need to have a record of the call in order for the call to have happened. One *needs* an authoritative record of a business transaction (if only cash in a drawer) for the transaction to even exist.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

Tingling

JamesFinister — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:37:26 +0000

Antonio,

I think some of the reason for you spider senses tingling is that the ITSM goalposts are on the move just as they were in reach.

Most of us have been aiming towards a view of operational IT services that add value - using ITIL as a service differentiator.

The possibility exists though that our consumers aren't interested in that value add. Or actually there was never value to be added where we were looking for it, only barriers to be removed.

What they want is a commodity service that enables the other aspects of IT to deliver value.

Who cares about negotiating n SLA if the service is "just there"? What service is there to manage in any sense that is visible to the customer?
The only negotiation around an SLA becomes "How is it OK for us to disappoint you by not meeting your expectation?"

All those good and essential things we need to do to deliver the commodity service sink beneath the waterline.

Which leads to the question of whether your professional services route is a way of rising above the surface again. The idea is initially attractive, but what exactly would it involve that other people in the business or the value network are not already delivering? Remember in a lot of organizations IT is playing catch up when it comes to the service catalogue compared to what their customers are already offering to the outside world.

I should clarify that I think most IT departments are not yet in a position to deliver commodity services and ITSM remains very relevant.

IT product management

skeptic — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:59:00 +0000

I'm sure you're right Spider. And it is because IT does not provide pure service. As discussed above, nearly every provider in nearly every industry provides a mix of goods and services. we should be talking about IT product management, where a product is a mix of goods and services. This is exactly the same existing product management discipline that Ian Clayton often refers us to.

Arachnid sense

avallesalas — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:23:13 +0000

Lately my sixth sense (what Parker called arachnid sense) is buzzing around this subject. I don't know exactly how to explain this, but something is telling me that we are wrong... really wrong: all the ITSM "science" is talking about Services, but then, when we try to explore a little bit more those concepts we find that in fact we are talking about two very different kind of "services": IT Services -something that, in fact, is a more or less complex IT Information System- and "Profesional Services" -something that matches the definitions of services (intangible, non stockable, etc etc) that we have seen in this thread-

Can you tell me that the Database, the router and the server are "intangible"?
Can you tell me that for a cloud provider, the virtual servers are non-stockable?

The IT Information System is stockable and tangible, what is non-stockable and intangible is the *use* that the business makes of those IS... (the information, may be the transactions, the conversations....)

We use those "profesional services" (what Pink calls profesional capabilities in the "defining service catalogs..." book) in order to ensure that the IT services are delivered to the users in the best possible conditions.

So I think (and please, dont forget that this is not a mature thinking, just an intuition or arachnid sense) that the root cause of the discussions and probably of a big portion of ITIL incoherences is the usage of the word service (and not linking to the word IT) in IT Service Management.

Using ITIL and the other tools, we don't do Service Management... we do IT Information Systems management... using profesional capabilities, structured as processes and functions, and so on...

What's your opinion about this?

Antonio

Antonio Valle
G2, Gobierno y Gestión de TI
http://www.gedos.es

User journeys

JamesFinister — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:15:00 +0000

I like the transactional view, though of course we need to be aware IT people tend to interpret transaction in a very concrete way.

A service is less and less about discreet, consecutive or overt transactions.

I wish I hadn't written that sentence before thinking of examples!

Retailers long moved on from looking at single purchases at the cash register to the overall relationship with specific customers. via loyalty card schemes and on line shopping. They are also increasingly aware of how their customers use other services. Not just services from competitors but also services that add value to their core offering. This can be a driver for acquisitions. With the rise in social media we would probably be wise to take into account how customers interact and respond with other consumers.

Actually I'm tempted to use Rob's own move from Microsoft to acceptance of the cloud as an example.

That darned paper clip did not turn Word into a service based solution, but it is IT type thinking; we layer a service element on top of the product rather than designing a product as an integral part of a service.

beyond "intangible and non-storable"

skeptic — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:07:00 +0000

the inseparability is implicit in "non-storable" and can be explained in that context, keeping the definition simple.

If you want to go beyond "intangible and non-storable" then one of my favourite references, Haksever at al (2000), lists four properties :
Intangibility (acts, deeds or performances)
Inseparability (provision and consumption are inseparable "of most services")
perishability (I like "non-storable" better for reasons discussed above)
Variability (the outcome of the service is dependent on an interaction with a user and therefore every occurrence is potentially different as is every satisfaction)

Another of my favourites, USMBOK, lists these same four and attributes them to a 1993 study by Hartman and Lindgren. it also lists these attributes:
Lack of transportability
Labour intensive
Demand fluctuations
Buyer involvement
Client-based relationships

Both books also discuss other detailed aspects that distinguish services from goods.

USMBOK also discusses transaction-based services. It really is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of SM anywhere.

basic voice

skeptic — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:52:58 +0000

Surely every phone call is a transaction? How is basic voice excluded?

IT services as transactions

Charles T. Betz — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:28:24 +0000

I think that the idea that information services are by definition transactional has merit. I just re-acquainted myself with David McGoveran's excellent series on the topic (available by request from http://www.alternativetech.com/). One needs to start from the premise that business itself is transactional by definition. In a business context, what else does IS do other than executing and controlling state changes in data sets and authoritatively guaranteeing their integrity across creating, reading, updating, and deleting? The history of information technology, even pre-Turing/von Neumann, can be read in this light.

These fundamental ACID responsibilities aggregate up into the longer lived transactions by which we assert and accept value, up to and including legally enforceable contractual and property rights.

All else is subordinate, preparatory, or ancillary. Storing a PowerPoint file, uncorrupted... that is a transaction.

This also paves the way towards the correct application of industrial analogies, as I have commented on here.

This definition does tend to exclude pure telecomm services, e.g. basic voice...

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com