Defining business goals for the service model

The most basic step involved in defining a service model is defining the specific business goals you hope to achieve with the model.

To do so, the IT or Integration Service (IS) group must engage the business managers in defining short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals for service impact management for the enterprise. These goals guide the design and development of deliverables for all service model development phases and define the amount of time and effort required for development and implementation.

Some possible goals for service impact management are as follows:

• Operational efficiency—This type of implementation is run by and for the IT or IS group. It consists of a thin layer of logical groups on top of a large number of IT resources, ranging from applications and systems to hard disks and other hardware CIs. Services are just logical groupings that provide a convenient way of classifying the technical resources.
• Business-focused operational efficiency—This type of implementation is likely to involve various populations and centers of management in the enterprise. It consists of a balanced representation of the operational environment, encompassing the IT CIs, such as systems and applications, and the logical CIs, such as services, user groups, and other business objects.
• Business continuity and service availability—This type of implementation is driven from the top and ensures that IT or IS is delivering their services as agreed. It consists of a business-centric model in which business processes, services, and SLAs rely on a small number of vital IT CIs that measure the pulse of the underlying environment.