To manage IT services as defined in IT Service Management, we have go beyond the first step of identifying our IT services. True – identifying the services, managing the confusion about services, socializing them, and gathering agreement is an enormous step that requires great effort, however there’s much more activity required in the journey.
Assigning service ownership is just as important as assigning process ownership. Without ownership, continual improvement can be difficult and there will certainly be confusion about who makes the call on operational issues, strategy, design, continuity, etc. Consider that when a process is broken and there is no process owner to address the issue, workarounds are employed by those who are supposed to be using the process, over time the workarounds become the process. The same can be true for services. Who should people approach to fix a broken service? The application owner possibly, but the provision of a service spans technical and organizational stacks, each with their own leadership and responsibilities contributing to the delivery of a service. An application can be one of the elements involved in provisioning a service or multiple services. Many times, we see operational workarounds become the SOP for the service, which may be fine for the short term but not long term. Ownership of services and process as well as established and standardized governance around ownership is key to a well run ITSM program
