What are services?

A service is a means of delivering value aligned to your customers' needs. It is a portfolio construct designed to organize people, businesses, process, technology, and assets into groups which are useful for defining strategy and managing operations.

A service could:

• fulfill one or more customer needs

• enable one or more business capabilities

• support business objectives

• be perceived by an internal or external customer as a consumable product.

Services are a visual representation of your organization’s service structure, consisting of all your services and their dependencies. Services you set up are the ‘connectors’ of Jira Service Management – they can show what a change request could affect and what an incident could affect or be impacted by in an ITSM project.

How services work depends on how you want to use them – they’re designed to be customizable to your organization. In an ITSM environment, there are three common types of services.

Business service is a service type that is published to business users, and it typically underpins one or more business capabilities. Business services have a higher strategy value, and used to drive value directly for internal and external customers. Examples of a business service include delivery of financial services to customers of a bank, or goods to the customers of a retail store.

A business service could:

• break down into one or more service offerings. Examples include Payroll, Marketing Campaign, and Lead Management, Sales Enablement.

• be supported by an IT infrastructure.

Example of a business service

Name: General Ledger

Tier: 1

Description: Financial record keeping system including debit and credit account records validated by a trial balance. It records all financial transactions that take place.

Technical services is a service type that is published to service owners and typically underpins one or more business or application services. These services are technical in nature, and are handled by the IT service provider according to ITIL.

A technical service covers technology infrastructure and platforms. It would consist of one or more continuous integrations (CIs), and typically underpins a business or application service, for example, hosting service.

The technical service needs to be in place to guarantee and support the operation of the business services. Examples of a technical service include managing servers, architecting data centers or implementing frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT, Identity Access Management, Automation Platform, and IT Development Operations.

Example of a technical service

Name: Okta

Tier: 1

Description: Identity Management and Single Sign On.

Application service is a service type that is a logical representation of a deployed application stack. Similar to technical service, an application service is a grouping of CIs and business services that are application-specific.

An application service consists of one or more CIs, and typically underpins a business service. An example of an application service is SAP finance.