IT Service Management, 3rd Edition

1 WHAT IS SERVICE MANAGEMENT?

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand what service management is and why it is so important to enterprises, we need to understand what services are and how service management can help service providers to deliver and manage these services.

A service is defined as follows:

SERVICE

A service is essentially a means of delivering value to customers. This is done by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the reason why they purchase or use a service. Typically this will be expressed as a specific business objective (e.g. to enable customers of a bank to perform all transactions and account management activities ...