Decomposing a business service

The purpose of decomposing a business service is to identify and document business processes, identify the IT services that support them, and identify IT CIs and assets that provide the IT services. For example, a hardware manufacturing organization might identify a business function as microprocessor procurement, a supporting IT service as procurement information storage, and the supporting IT assets as servers, databases, and related hardware and software systems.

On a high level, a service model is a collection of components, also known as configuration items (CIs), that represents a business service. A business service can have one or more business processes. Each business process can contain several functional applications, each of which can have multiple IT CIs. A service model will contain the processes, show how the CIs are interconnected, and show how CI failures propagate and impact the upstream services.

The following steps facilitate the process of creating a service model:

1. Identify business services.
    Sources of information include business unit managers, business process managers, and staff personnel knowledgeable about the business services. Company organization charts might be helpful in identifying the relevant people.
   The process involves interviewing the managers and identifying the following information:
   • Business processes – Identify key business processes such as market research,product planning, response management, or case management. There can be multiple levels of business processes, starting with higher-level core competencies and business functions to specific sub-business processes.
   • Functional applications – Identify the business applications that support the business processes. Map the business processes to the functional apps.
      Map the functional applications to IT service CIs to create business service models.
2. Identify IT services.
    Sources of information include IT managers and staff. Disaster recovery plans, help desk documents, and purchase orders might be useful in identifying IT CIs and the business processes that they support.
   The process involves identifying the list of IT assets (components). Interview the IT management and staff, or utilize an asset/configuration management database as resources:
   • Create a list of IT services (service catalog); discover what IT services are offered to business units through use of IT assets. Examples of IT services include customer support and customer call monitoring.
   • For each IT service, identify the IT assets that support the service. Discovery solutions such as BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) help with automated identification of IT assets and offer continuous and regular updates to ensure that the service model components accurately reflect real IT environment. 
   • Identify the interdependencies among the IT CIs and formulate a topology map. Consider the relationships and dependencies between IT CIs.
3. Build a business service model, and link the business processes to the IT services that you have identified.