We previously spoke about the three components that comprise a service offering, they include goods, access to resources, and service actions. Remember for the exam, goods, for example, could be the output, for example, a mobile application and it's targeted to a specific consumer. Some consumers want mobile applications that have video or they have sound or maybe they just have text, as a service provider, you're going to provision that mobile application. In addition, you're going to allow that consumer to have access to the application, but maybe not to all of the licenses behind the scenes. You will grant access, maybe you'll have a login or password associated with storing their particular data, but not have access to all of the data that you house for all of the consumers combined. Your job also includes providing service actions and as a service provider, you need to make sure that whatever you provide to the consumer, you're able to support it properly and that's done by the technical support or user support. Remember, for the exam, the components of a service offering include the goods, the access to those goods or resources, and the service actions to keep those services up and running. Let's drill down into what is the makeup of a service relationship? Actually, it's a two-way street. It's what the service provider is offering and what the consumer will accept, it has to be agreed to. Yes, there is provisioning and there is consumption, but is there a relationship management piece involved as well? Service relationship, similar to customer relationship management, is about joint activities, it's not one way, it's not just the provider offering something to the consumer, but the consumer has to provide feedback and has to negotiate in what they will accept and what they won't, we call that co-creation. Co-creation of value and service offerings, so it's a two-way street, you're the provider and the service is being provided to the service consumer. You guys both play a role in making sure that the relationship is always managed by speaking on a regular basis, having status reports or even maybe having some type of contract or agreement in place. When you're dealing with people, you have to manage those relationships, they're not just going to manage themselves. Another term related to service management is provisioning IT services, so service provision is about the activities that an organization takes in order to provide resources and outputs and outcomes to service consumers. It's also about fulfilling those agreed actions in those contracts and those service level agreements, it's also about monitoring and continual improvement. It's a lot of work that the service provider has to do, they have to make sure that the services are configured properly so that they're always up and running and not causing any outages or failures. You want to have access to the resources easy for the users, we call that making it user friendly. You want to make sure that you can fulfill the service actions as outlined in the agreement, maybe it's about if a service has a bottleneck, how fast are you going to respond to make sure that service continues to work so that the user is not adversely affected? We're going to talk later in the course about service level management, this is about metrics and understanding service performance and capturing downtime and up-time and which you can do to continually improve upon the service year after year after year. If you are providing goods and products in addition to services, as the service IT provider, you want to make sure that you provision and supply goods when needed as well. The final term in service relationships is service consumption and what is that exactly? Those are the activities that are performed by the service consumer, they have a job to play in co-creating value as well. These are their activities and we call those the activities of the service consumer or the client or the customer or the user. For example, if you purchase a cell phone and you drop it or it gets wet, you run out of memory, you run out of data, you have a responsibility in making sure that those service actions are responded to, either by taking it back to the service provider or the retailer and following up, you have to accept outcomes as stated in those agreements and those contracts. Co-creating value is a two-way street again, but as the consumer, your job is to manage any good that you purchase or any product that you purchase and fulfill those actions, just like the service provider did when they provided the service to you, so co-creating value is a two-way street, it's about provisioning and it's about service consumption. In review of this module of key concepts, we talked about service management and we talked about providing services that are valuable to the consumer, consumers want positive outcomes or results. We know that a service creates positive outcomes and that the consumer doesn't own the services, but the service provider does and they take on the cost and the risk. The number one stakeholder in determining the value of a service is a customer and customers would like costs and risks reduced. The formula for making sure that all services have added value includes utility and warranty, utility is fit for purpose, what the service does, what is the objective? The warranty is the assurance that the service will continue to work regardless of condition. We talked about different varieties of stakeholders, all of these are stakeholders: the customer, the user, the sponsor who approves the budget, the service provider and the organization. It's really important that both the service consumer and the service provider have a good relationship and that's what we call collaboration. Service management activities include provisioning or deploying services or providing services, using or consuming services and the service actions needed to keep those services up and running. We know that service offerings are a collection of more than one service.
