Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

« Defining the Service Owner role - Part 1 | Main | Service Catalog - What is your focus area.? »

Defining the Service Owner role - Part 2

In part 1 of my post – “Defining the Service owner role”, I penned about the need for service centric roles in IT organizations and some of the common misconceptions with respect to the service owner role. The reasons for these misconceptions need to be looked into.

Why there are misconceptions?

Why is it so painful to determine Service owner for a Service? Here are couple of reasons I could think of:

a)  This role has been largely missed in the ITIL literature to date. No guidelines were available on choosing a service stakeholder as a service owner.
b)  Services are being viewed as IT systems or at component level (applications, Server, Network, etc) that definitely have owners associated with it. Many IT centric organizations have application owner and asset owners in place.
c) The service owner role cannot be hard-coded as there are no pre-defined rules for selecting a service owner based on some set of activities he is responsible for. The level of ownership varies based on scenarios.What is right?
Following are my viewpoints around choosing service roles based on specific pattern of activities performed by these roles: Business Customer: Purchases the service for consumption by End-users. They often need service offerings (e.g. Service Catalog) from the IT to choose the right level of service they need.Business Relationship (Engagement) manager: Liaise with business & technology to translate strategic objectives to project and support requirements & vice-versa. Obtain funding and alignment from business on key IT initiatives and projects. This role is actively involved in defining IT strategy inline with the Business strategy. 

Service owner: Accountable for delivering the service consistently in accordance with the business requirements and the service design. Service owner role is not directly responsible for people or Budget. Service Owner owns a portfolio of services and manages them throughout their entire lifecycle – service inception to service retirement. Service owners should have the visibility on service pipeline (services that are being planned and built) & services in production.

Service ownership can be defined at a lower atomic level (e.g. Server, application, etc.) or a higher bundle level (e.g. Data center, Production support, etc.) At higher level, various types of atomic services interact together to form a Service bundle (or portfolio) aligned to customer’s business needs. The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager.

 Service owners do not represent the provider side of Service delivery, but are more aligned to the customer / business side of delivery. Service owners work with atomic service owners and service delivery managers (see below) to standardize and productize services and catalog the service offering.


Once the service offering is cataloged, they work with the Relationship mangers to “expose” the services to business customers and help them choose the right level of service they want. In this role service owner act more both like a product manager as well as a marketing manager. Once the service views are exposed to customers, the service owners work with delivery managers and SLAs managers to ensure the quality of services delivered to the customers.


The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager. For example, the head of Datacenter operations can be a Service Manager to whom the individual service owners (eg: Server management, Application management, etc.) report to.

 

Service Delivery managers: Mostly represent the provider side of the service. Delivery management includes organization, administration, and supervision of the people, processes, and technologies to provide and maintain the business and technical functions needed to successfully achieve business needs.

SLA Manager: Ensures that the agreement between Service owner and business is maintained and improved through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting


The Service owner roles have a global scope and have end to end Service accountability for specific internal services. This role has both tactical and strategic elements to it. Tactical – to ensure the service continues to perform within defined service levels. Strategic – to input to and ensure delivery of Service Improvement Plans.

 

A good service owner is the owner who maintains a balance between the strategic & tactical elements, without putting their hands deep into either of them.

The Service owner is a conductor. A good conductor cannot play all the instruments but must understand how they all work and how to blend them to achieve perfect sounds. The owner has the responsibility to blend the team to achieve a perfect business.

Do we really need all these roles ? Can we "orchestrate" these roles? More on this in my next blog.

Posted by Guest Author on November 15, 2007 03:20 AM |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.infosysblogs.com/ITSM-service-matters-mt/mt-tb.fcgi/37

Comments

If the service owner doesn't own the budget for a service then who does? And what exactly does budget ownership mean to you?

Posted by: Phill | November 30, 2007 09:42 PM

For an organization that is structured based on its assets (vertical SBU like ) it would be easlier to think in terms of asset ownership, rather than service ownership. I think that if the organization can be restructured on the line of services that is provides to the end customer, service ownership will be less confusing and more prevalent.

Posted by: Indranath Mitra | December 2, 2007 06:34 AM

Extremely well written article. I just worked on an engagement where we had similar questions in a heavily matrixed organization.

We initiated a model similar to "Product Management" wherein the Service Manager is responsible for Service inception to its delivery. I don't think there is a silver bullet solution to this. It's still in the works and I see it evolving as they go down this path.

Posted by: Satish Kuppusami | March 6, 2008 03:49 PM

Very true Satish! Productization of services is key to running services in the context of business customers. The success of the service orientation depends on how scalable the organizations are to adopt the new culture.

Posted by: Renjith Sreekumar | March 23, 2008 06:00 PM

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Please key in the two words you see in the box to validate your identity as an authentic user and reduce spam.