What is service?
What is service?
Consider the act of giving IT support: fulfilling a simple request or fixing an issue for a customer.
Contrast this with the craft of providing IT service.
Requests are still fulfilled but with the knowledge that the customer won't be coming back for more assistance. You've either provided everything the customer needs in the form of clear instructions or great documentation, or, the service is so well designed that the customer doesn't need to follow any instructions: it just works!
Customers will still call you about incidents, but you'll go the extra mile to make sure the user can continue to work, and if they can't, you'll give them updates and ETAs so they can re-plan their day around you.
Incidents trigger the activity of root cause analysis - doing your best to make sure it never happens again for this or any of your other customers.
Behind the scenes are regular activities that prevent the customer from ever having an issue in the first place: quality assurance and change management ensure changes don't negatively impact the customer. Proactive measures such as capacity management, performance management, end-of-life management, security patching, maintenance, supplier management etc are designed to prevent incidents from ever occurring.
You'll constantly review these supporting processes and improve them to better meet the needs of the customer.
Without all of these activities an IT service is just a product. With everything above wrapped around it it becomes a service.
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