Business services are the activities that help a company to carry out its daily operations. This includes services such as banking, transportation and warehousing, insurance, communication etc. Unlike physical goods, business services are intangible and cannot be stored for future use. They are consumed at the same time they are provided, which means that demand and supply for a given service are closely linked.
The Business Services industry is a large and diverse sector. Its contributions to the European economy are significant, ranging from telecommunications and IT services to financial management, employment, and facility management. In addition, this sector enables companies to provide value-added services to their customers in an increasingly competitive market.
As a result, there are a wide range of challenges faced by the industry. These include managing the complexity of IT services and aligning them with broader business objectives, achieving buy-in from stakeholders, and changing organizational culture.
While there are many benefits of Business services, some of the key ones are reducing costs, providing specialized expertise, and fostering innovation. By outsourcing non-core functions to a Business services provider, businesses can focus on their core competencies and achieve greater efficiency and competitiveness.
Outsourcing can also be more cost-effective than maintaining in-house teams, as the company only pays for the services it needs. Furthermore, it is flexible and scalable, allowing a business to expand or shrink its offerings as needed. Finally, it provides a level of consistency and predictability that is not possible when relying solely on in-house resources.
Depending on the type of service, a business may need to define its own service model or use an existing one. For example, a software development company might use an ITIL framework to guide its service delivery processes, while an organization that offers telecommunications as part of its business might choose a COBIT model to guide its operations.
A Service Management Platform (SMP) helps organizations manage the complexity of their IT services by enabling them to view and monitor a complete picture of their operational services, from end-to-end. SMPs enable organizations to create custom dashboards to better visualize and analyze data, as well as set up automatic notifications based on criticality or other criteria.
When an incident occurs, a SMP automatically displays the affected business services in the Business Services page. The status of each business service is displayed in color according to its current status: red indicates an outage, yellow represents a potential outage, and green signifies that the service is running normally. The SMP can also display an incident timeline on the page for quick visibility of a particular incident.
An IT service can support multiple business services, and each supporting technical service that is mapped to a business service has a unique impact on that business service. In general, an incident on a supporting technical service must have a priority at or above the level of the mapped business service in order to affect it. If you want to customize the impact levels for each business service, navigate to Services Business Services and select the name of the desired business service.
