Service Strategy
Service Strategy
Strategy Management for IT Services defines service strategy as a standardized process for building strategic assets with vision, strategic goals, innovation, value creation, and a resilient attitude for adopting new changes.
ITSM Service Strategy's main focus is to define the market, propose the service offerings, develop the service offerings as strategic assets, execute the developed offerings, also measure and evaluate the strategies.
Strategy Generation for IT Services is the most critical process for the long-term sustainability of the organization’s offerings.
Service Strategy Process Description
Strategy management for IT services subprocesses can be defined as:
Strategic Service Assessment
The Business strategy manager identifies the organization's strengths and weaknesses. This is done by analyzing factors such as – existing services, resources, capabilities, projects, finance, operations, etc.
The next step is to identify growth opportunities and threats. By analyzing external factors such as - customer’s, supplier’s, partner’s, political trend’s, socio-economic trend, technology trend, etc. organization gets a fair idea of its current position in the market and can formalize future growth and
expansion plans.
The business strategy manager lists all market spaces where the organization currently has hold and also lists any new market space identified after internal and external analysis. To decide on which market space to target it is important to define all critical success factors required for a market. Based on this information a decision can be taken to cater to the market need or not.
High-level objectives are set after discussion with the steering committee, service management director, and service management process owners.
Service Strategy Definition
The business strategy manager defines the perspective to find out how objects can be achieved in the best possible way. Vision and mission statements are prepared in alignment with the business objective to be achieved.
To determine how the service provider will be differentiated from other service providers in the industry the business strategy manager finalizes a position for the organization.
Based on positioning strategy and objectives to be achieved the business strategy manager finalizes on the type of service and the type of customer to be targeted. All services are mapped to business outcomes and aligned with the end organization objective.
Determine critical success factors, risks, assumptions,s, and dependencies to be considered while preparing the strategic plan. Prepare the IT strategy and decide on actions to be taken to achieve the objectives.
Service Strategy Execution
Identify budget requirements for developing new services identified as per the IT strategy. Perform
service valuation to check for feasibility of developing a service and if post-program ROI is required.
Prioritize IT strategy plans in the order of importance and ease of implementation. Communicate the plan to stakeholders.
The business strategy manager lists down all available assets and their utilization pattern. Organization services, processes, skills, tools, etc. are compared with competitors and the gap is documented.
If an organization lacks any of the critical success factors required to be successful in an identified market space then such critical success factors are to be developed.
Investment options are prioritized and approved by senior management. Service offerings are
developed accordingly. The business strategy manager will work with other service management
process owners to implement strategic plans and achieve the desired outcome.
Metrics
- Total number of services triggered as a result of IT strategy
- Number of new proposals plans defined
- Number of new services proposed
- Number of failed services (that have not been approved by strategy manager/IT steering group)
- Total time is taken for proposing a new service in the service portfolio
