ITIL's Service Design 5

What does the Service Design stage actually design? Many readers of ITIL V3 assume that Service Design is primarily responsible for IT services. In fact, this stage is responsible for five different aspects:

Service solutions
Service management systems and tools
Technology architectures and management systems
IT and service management processes
Measurement methods and metrics

ITIL’s holistic approach to design ensures consistency and integration across the full portfolio of IT services. Consideration of each design begins with an assessment of the “as-is” situation, with a view to identifying relationships, dependencies, compatibility, and, especially, opportunities to leverage existing capabilities and resources (service assets). Both opportunities and gaps are identified. This may validate the design of the new service, or may indicate the need to modify or adapt the design of the new service or other existing services.

Service Design is charged with designing services that deliver business value while being manageable, supportable, cost-effective, and flexible enough to scale and incorporate enhancements throughout the operational lifetime of that service.

Strongly emphasized in V3 is the idea that everyone in the IT organization is responsible for the successful provision of value to business customers in the form of IT services.

This is fundamental to ITIL’s treatment of the five aspects of design. Service Design must consider the requirements of all other stages of the service lifecycle. Likewise, processes and participants in other stages of the lifecycle have the responsibility to provide feedback on how well these goals are achieved in testing and in the live environment, and how design of IT services might be improved to optimize total cost of utilization of services throughout their operational lifetime.

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