The service
portfolio is made up of three distinct elements. These are the pipeline, catalogue, and
retired services. The services themselves will move through thirteen unique
statuses that help to define where the service is currently in its lifecycle.
The portfolio represents the complete set of services that is currently being
managed by the service provider and in turn represents the service provider’s
commitments and investments across all of the customers and market spaces the
provider is engaged in. It is a portrayal of all contractual commitments with
current customers, new service developments for either current or new customers
and any ongoing improvement plans initiated from CSI. Additionally the portfolio can also contain any
third party services that are currently being engaged by supplier management. It can be presented as anything from a
structured document to a database and is a tool that is utilized from service
strategy to continual service improvement.
The pipeline element
represents all services that are under consideration or development, but are
not yet available to customers. It can
include investment opportunities, since these must be traced to the delivery of
the service and the value proposition that is under consideration. This offers a business view of possible
future services which may not yet be published to the customer or user
communities. This therefore represents the service provider’s strategic vision
and future growth direction and should be continually fed by service strategy,
service design and CSI to ensure the ability to meet changing customer
requirements and to remain relevant in the market space. Service will move from the pipeline to the
catalog normally when the service is moved from development to operations.
The catalog
represents all live IT services, including those available for deployment. This is the only element that is available
for viewing to customers and is used to maintain the sale and delivery of IT
services. It may have several customer views and shows the services that are
currently available for use, how the services are intended to be used, the
business functions and or business units the services enable and functionality
and warranty (tied to SLAs and SLRs) that the customer or user can anticipate
from each service. The catalog in many cases will also list dependencies
between services. This can be presented
in the form of service units and or service packages. There are to distinct
views of the catalogue. There is the customer view which was described above
and there is the technical view. This is
the part of the catalogue used by the IT service provider and is not viewable
by the customer or user groups. This
part of the catalogue is used to show the service and the underlying supporting
services and IT infrastructure that is used in delivering customer facing
services.
Retired services
represent the services that are either in the process of being retired or have
already been retired. Services being
retired are ones that are still being used by a portion of the customer
community but are no longer available for use by anyone who is not already
engaged in using that service. Retired
services are no longer in use by anyone from the user community but are still
listed in the catalogue. Service
Portfolio Management will define a policy around how long a service will remain
in the service portfolio and works with service transition in ensuring the
services are appropriately retired from operation in the live environment.
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