Defining the Service Owner role - Part 1
With V3.0 shifting the focus of ITIL from its traditional process centric approach towards a service lifecycle approach, there is an increased need for defining service centric roles within IT organizations. This paradigm shift of focus from IT systems & processes view to IT services view, which drive creation of values and influence positive outcomes to the customers, have made services the most dynamic “asset” with in an IT organization. As organizations progress towards the “Service-centric” model, the question of "who owns a Service" is being asked within an organization perpetually at various levels and at various times.
In setting a context for the service owner role, it is worth seeing the definition of a service itself. “Service” is defined in ITIL V3 as - “Services are means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks”. The service owner plays a key role in maintaining the dynamicity of a service through out its lifecycle in delivering value to its customers.
Why & when do we need a service owner?
IT organizations are keen in driving towards the Business-IT alignment by adopting guidelines and processes outlined in ITIL. In this effort, they had defined process centric roles like Service Level Manager, Availability Manager, Service delivery manager, etc. These roles worked more closely with specific IT domains and processes and were aligned towards enhancing technology aspects of delivery, resulting in IT losing the business focus. This coupled with the new service-centric approach, outlined in ITIL V3.0, have prompted the need for roles that work more closely with business customers and help “integrate” technology delivery with service demand from business customers.With Services also becoming agnostic to organization charts, it requires a great deal of enterprise accountability and oversight to manage it in its life cycle. The Service owner is one key role that organization can look into in enabling the accountability and deriving value out of services. Truly, some misconceptions exist with respect to this role and there need to be discussions around defining the scope of this role.
What are the misconceptions?
As part of working with some major customers in Service related projects (Service Catalog, Service Level Management, etc …) I had encountered some scenarios where I had to ask the same question – “Who is the Service owner for this Service?” This is how service stakeholders typically respond to this question:Support team1 (3rd-party): "We report to our Delivery Manager. He manages the delivery and he is the Service Owner".
Service Delivery Manager: "I only manage the delivery of Service. We deliver the Service to the Customer XX and they are the owners"Support team2 (internal): "We do not know what service you are talking about. We only support the application. May be, you can check with our PM"
Support PM: "We are supporting only applications. The infrastructure is supported being by XXX. We do not own this service. You may check with the SLA manager as he is setting SLAs and reviewing it with all service stakeholders"SLA Manager: "Well, I am managing relationship between Technology & Business by ensuring that the providers adhere to SLAs and services are monitored, measured and reported to validate the service performance"… But, I am not the service owner.
Business group: “I pay for the service and it should be owned by technology and shouldn’t they own the responsibility to provide value to what I am paying for"From the above conversations, it is evident that no one really wants to own a service as a coherent whole, but is rather happy to handle it in “pieces”. Surely, this is the situation that many of us might have gone through when trying to identify the person accountable for services.
Are there any other roles / views? more on this in my next post
Comments
Interesting one!!
The answer to the question is definitely not so straight forward. Can we find an answer to this puzzel in the 'Service lifecycle' thoery propounded in ITIL v3
It is difficult to pin down a person/ team as being an owner of a service.
"Service Owner" to me is a dynamic role.
The ownership of a service lies in the OSI layer where disruption (to normal operations) occurs.
Because of the interconnections and dependencies between Infrastructure elements, "Service Enablement" can only happen with the cumulative efforts of all the partners.
Posted by: Roopa Nataraj | November 6, 2007 08:59 PM