Glossary

Service

Also called: business service

A unit of value the organization offers to an internal or external stakeholder, underpinned by capabilities and resources.

A unit of value the organization offers to an internal or external stakeholder, underpinned by capabilities and resources. It enables value co-creation by facilitating the outcomes the consumer seeks, without them having to manage the associated costs and risks.

The test of a well-declared service is that it has an owner and a criticality. With no owner there is nobody accountable when it degrades; with no criticality, every investment and recovery decision is made on intuition or on whoever shouts loudest.

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Related terms

Business capability

What an organization must know how to do, expressed independently of who does it or which system supports it.

Business process

A coordination of activities, decisions, roles, data and rules aimed at producing a valuable outcome.

Configuration item

A governable element that supports services and processes: applications, assets, technology components or critical resources.

Criticality

The degree to which the interruption of a service, capability or process affects the organization's operations or compliance.

Service catalogue

The register of an organization's services and offerings with owner, value proposition, criticality, cost or price, implementing capabilities and supporting CIs.

Service offering

The concrete, requestable form in which a service is presented and consumed; the user-facing side of the service.

Service portfolio

The set of services an organization offers, understood as the operational expression of its value proposition rather than an administrative list of request types.

Service value system

The ITIL 4 model whose core is a value chain running from plan and improve through to deliver and support, fed by practices and governed by guiding principles such as focus on value and…

Value co-creation

The principle that value is not produced by the provider alone but arises from the interaction between provider and consumer.