My company is an IT consulting firm which helps organizations bring their business processes to the cloud leveraging the ServiceNow platform and ITIL standards. In project engagements, we typically have to describe what a business service is and how it is use in IT service management.
ServiceNow defines a business service as the following “A business service is a set of interconnected applications and hosts which are configured to offer a service to the organization. Business service can be internal, like organization email system or customer-facing, like an organization web site.”. In the ServiceNow world, business services are part of the configuration management database which is a repository of applications, hardware such as network devices, servers, and appliances, and databases. By defining business services in the configuration management database, an organization will be able to understand what hardware and software make up that business service.
In the CIO article SOA Definition and Solutions, it defines a service as “software chunks, or components, constructed so that they can be easily linked with other software components”. By defining business services and leveraging the configuration management database, application architects can better plan and refine their service oriented architecture. This is possible because they are able to see which applications are tied to which critical business processes and be able to create reusable code based on similarity between processes.
The configuration management database is always a difficult deliverable to provide for clients. Typically, clients don’t have a well-defined business or technology architecture. ServiceNow offers an automation tool to build the configuration management database which is a good start in defining the infrastructure architecture. By defining an organization’s business services and tying them back to the infrastructure architecture in the configuration management database, it helps understand which applications are part of which business processes. This in turns enables service-oriented architecture planning and continuous improvement.
Throughout ServiceNow, business services are associated with help desk tickets, change management records, and project management. In a service oriented architecture world, this helps to track the integrity of code, the deployments of new services, and the planning for development of the services.
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