Define Your Enterprise IT and Digital Services
Grow beyond the IT department that builds solutions and become the business partner that delivers value.
When identifying IT services, many IT leaders skip the critical first step of understanding their enterprise services and customers. IT leaders often:
- Fail to see the connection between enterprise customers and IT customers.
- Think operationally and therefore see services either as “customer services” or confuse them with applications, systems, and technology.
- Rely on tools to define what IT offers.
- Fail to recognize the role of culture and transformation in creating and sustaining aligned IT services.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Abandon the traditional approach of cataloging all that IT has to offer and deploying these offerings to the organization as needs arise.
- For optimal value delivery, shift your perspective away from IT and toward the needs of the enterprise customer. This method not only ensures accurate business service alignment and high-value service delivery, but also secures IT’s place in the organization as a trusted business advisor.
Impact and Result
- Take the essential first step most IT organizations miss and define your IT services from the outside in:
- Replace nebulous concepts of services with a coherent definition.
- Enable services through a customer-focused culture.
- Craft an aspirational service vision and use it as you identify and document your enterprise-aligned IT services.
- Chronicle your IT services, along with the value they provide, to your executives.
Workshop: Define Your Enterprise IT and Digital Services
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Understand Services, Customers, and Where to Start
The Purpose
- Level-set what a service and its related components are so that in the later activities, services are identified accurately.
- Introduce the importance of culture for enabling and supporting services.
- Assess areas of focus for a service enabling/supporting culture in the organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Understand what a service is to build on when identifying IT services in later activities.
- Identified elements of culture to ensure the ongoing success of IT services.
Activities
Outputs
Consider example services.
- Documented reason for why each example is a service
Determine where to start based on maturity level.
- Estimated maturity level to use to determine which customer to target
Complete a cultural readiness assessment.
- Completed cultural readiness assessment
Module 2: Prioritize Cultural Areas of Focus and Identify Business Customers and Services, and IT Services
The Purpose
- Determine which areas of focus are most important to address in the cultural assessment.
- Introduce identifying enterprise customers and services using the value stream in their own capability map.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Understand what they would like to focus on for culture change and when they’d like to focus on these things in a high-level timeline (now, next, later).
- Apply concepts of service, customer, value, and value chain learned previously to their own environment to begin understanding the enterprise customer and services. This sets the foundation for accurate IT service alignment completed in later exercises.
Activities
Outputs
Prioritize areas to address and enter into timeline.
- Prioritized list of areas to focus on to transform culture to best support IT services
Use value stream map to identify business customers.
- Business customers identified and aligned to value stream
Use value stream map to identify business services.
- Business services identified
Begin to identify IT services.
- Initial IT services identified and aligned to business services and customers
Module 3: Identify and Align IT Services
The Purpose
- Continue to identify and align IT services to business services and customers.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Identified IT services aligned to business services
Activities
Outputs
Continue to identify and align IT services.
- IT services aligned to business services and customers
Module 4: Identify and Align IT Services to Business Services and Goals and Complete Executive Presentation
The Purpose
Key Benefits Achieved
Activities
Outputs
Finish identifying and aligning IT services.
- Draft service map with reviewed and finalized services aligned to business services, customers, and business goals
Define IT services and align to goals.
- List of services with service definitions, owners, and aligned goals identified
Review services.
- Finalized service map and list of services
Complete executive presentation.
- Completed executive presentation
Craft message and practice delivering executive presentation.
- Crafted communication for delivering executive presentation
Module 5: Next Steps and Wrap-Up (Offsite)
The Purpose
- Finalize work outstanding from previous steps and answer any questions.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Participants have thought about and documented how to customize the Info-Tech IT dashboards to use in their organization and have everything they need to customize the dashboards with their own metrics and visuals (if necessary).
Activities
Outputs
Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.
- Completed list of IT services with descriptions, owners, and strategic goal alignment
Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.
- IT strategy roadmap
Define Your Enterprise IT and Digital Services
Grow beyond the IT department that builds solutions to become the business partner that delivers value.
Glossary of terms
Customer
Someone who uses your services.
- Business Customer
- Internal organization customers: HR, Finance, Marketing, Legal, etc.
- Enterprise Customer
- External organization customers: students, shoppers, constituents, etc.
Service
- All the activities, apps, processes, data, resources, and technology assembled into coherent, ready-to-use packages and delivered to individuals or businesses to address a need or enable them to do something.
- Services deliver something of value to customers, often in real time and through many different customer touchpoints and interactions.
- In this way, the close connection between the organization and the customer forms the customer experience.
Enterprise, Business, and Digital Services
- Enterprise Services: Services the organization’s customers consume, e.g. student registration services.
- Business Services: Services the business (internal departments) consume, e.g. HR, Finance, or Legal.
- Digital Services: Services that use digital technologies, e.g. online taxes, online student registration, or online shopping. Digital services often bring IT closer to the enterprise customer.
Product
- The outcome of a production process that addresses customer needs and goals.
- The customer relationship is not as closely connected as it is with a service.
Value
- What a service provides to a customer.
- A customer does not care about the effort it takes you to deliver the services, only about the value of the service to them.
- Services are distinct from products mainly in how organizations and the customers create value together (often in real time) to form a customer experience.
Analyst Perspective
Take a strategic approach to IT services by adopting an outside-in perspective.
What comes to mind when you think of IT services? If you're in IT, you'll often think of the IT service desk, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT service management (ITSM) processes, or even the configuration management database (CMDB) that is waiting to be populated. You may even think of customer service or service catalogs. These are all important tools, frameworks, and approaches that enable IT services, but they are not the services themselves.
With all these examples enmeshed into the concept of "service," it is easy to understand how IT leaders attempt to disentangle the mess either with a tool, thereby letting the tool define the service, or by doing what seems reasonable: matching the various IT options to business requests as they appear. These are the traditional inside-out approaches that typecast IT in the "order taker" role and leave customers feeling tepid about IT services.
The better approach is to start from the outside in and see IT services from the perspective of the enterprise customer, who does not care about all the "IT stuff" and just wants a ready-to-use solution that takes all the worry, costs, risks, and effort away from them so they can do what they need to do.
Take the essential, and often missed, first step of defining your IT services from the enterprise customer perspective to ensure IT services align perfectly to enterprise needs and ensure IT delivers value to the organization as a trusted business partner and innovator.
Diana MacPherson
Senior Research Analyst, CIO
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech's Approach |
Most IT leaders struggle to define IT services, seeing them as something only the IT service desk offers, synonymous with the ITIL framework, or a tangle of IT applications, code, and processes. To resolve this ambiguity, they:
In short, IT leaders traditionally apply a technology-first approach and catalog what technology IT has, without first considering what solutions the customer needs. |
IT organizations take a technology-first approach because they:
Ultimately, the IT organization cannot mature or offer services that provide real business value if they continue employing a "technology first" approach. |
Take the essential first step most IT organizations miss and define your IT services from the "outside in":
|
Info-Tech Insight
Abandon the traditional approach of cataloging all that IT has to offer and deploying these offerings to the organization as needs arise. For optimal value delivery, shift your perspective away from IT and toward the needs of the enterprise customer. This method not only ensures accurate business service alignment and high value service delivery, but also secures IT's place in the organization as a trusted business advisor.
Your challenge
When identifying IT services, many IT leaders skip the critical first step of understanding their enterprise services and customers. IT leaders often:
- Fail to see the connection between enterprise customers and IT customers because organizations have not historically expected IT to interact directly with enterprise customers. Today's CIO must connect with the enterprise and therefore must consider how IT services align to enterprise services and deliver value to customers throughout the value chain.
- Think operationally and therefore see services either as "customer services" or confuse them with applications, systems, and technology. This bias causes CIOs to prefer tools over discovery in hopes they can expediate the process. A tool cannot reveal your services. You must learn what a service is, identify your enterprise's services, and align your IT services to them.
- Perceive IT services as an easy way to expand their CMDB. This mindset favors completeness over purpose as it fails to recognize the value of identifying and aligning IT services as a way to enable enterprise services.
- Fail to recognize the role of culture and transformation in creating and sustaining aligned IT services and, as a result, contend with many false starts.
The bottom line: There are no shortcuts to identifying your IT services and, if you want to deliver real value to your organization, you must start with enterprise services first. Avoid a "technology first" approach.
"The CIO role is no longer just delivering technology for IT projects but delivering business and customer outcomes through joint collaboration."
- Rong Xian of China Tourism Group
Source: IBM Institute for Business Value, 2021
Common obstacles
These organizational and psychological barriers make aligning enterprise services with IT services a challenge.
- Organizational barriers:
- A siloed culture that guards the enterprise customer relationship.
- A culture that does not enable a customer mindset.
- A culture that embodies the notion that IT is an internal department that does not serve external customers.
- Psychological barriers:
- CIOs forget that they have the power to change culture but must take an active role in changing it.
- A profound impulse within IT to build solutions rather than deliver value.
- A strong bias toward operational excellence at the expense of strategic thinking.
- A preference for using collected data over observing customer interactions.
Enterprise outcomes and IT success are interconnected but there are barriers to success.
40% of innovative CIOs identify impact on business outcomes as their criteria for success.
Source: IBM Institute for Business Value, 2021
44% of CIOs cite organizational complexity as a barrier to digital transformation.
Source: IBM Institute for Business Value, 2021
Info-Tech's approach
Do not start with your IT services; start with your enterprise customer.
The Info-Tech difference:
Be the strategic CIO whose IT services connect and enable the organization.
- Let go of outmoded notions of services and embrace a new model that aligns IT to deliver optimal value to the enterprise.
- Create your service vision then identify and align your services to it.
- Assess your cultural readiness then plan to enable behaviors that enable and sustain services.
- Employ our executive presentation to connect the service value dots for your executives, leading them from enterprise customers to IT services.
Prerequisites to starting this blueprint
- Completed Reference Architecture with Capability Map
- Maturity Level
Since the best approach to defining your IT and digital services requires an outside-in approach, a reference architecture with your organization's value stream and capabilities is essential as service definition starts with the value stream that addresses the needs of customers by producing outcomes at each activity step that services enable.
Ensure that before you begin this blueprint, you have either completed a reference architecture or have access to one of the reference architectures that correspond to your industry. You can find Info-Tech's research architecture templates by industry at Industry Coverage.
Defining IT and digital services requires an IT organization that can address services beyond a reactive or operational IT focus. IT organizations that have stabilized their operations have the resources to focus strategically on business stability or may have a maturity to be able to extend into new business. This means that this blueprint requires a maturity level of Trusted Operator or above. See the slide "Use your maturity level to determine which customers to target" for guidance for determining your maturity level. If you are below the Trusted Operator maturity level, review the Create a Service Management Roadmap blueprint first.
Note: If you are one maturity level down from a maturity level you are targeting, you can still complete this blueprint with the caveat that some of the work may be more challenging than if you were already at that maturity level.
Info-Tech's methodology for defining your enterprise IT and digital services
| 1. Redefine Services | 2. Build Your Service Ready Culture | 3. Envision and Identify Your Services | 4. Present Your Services to Your Executives | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase Steps |
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| Phase Outcomes | Baseline understanding of services; identified starting point for blueprint | Completed cultural readiness assessment; drafted in executive summary | Services vision statement Identified; defined IT services aligned to enterprise services; drafted in executive summary | Completed executive summary |
Insight Summary
IT services are more in demand than ever: "the digital services provided by applications aren't merely the face of the business but its heart". Source: F5, 2023
58% of organizations derive at least half their revenue from digital services.
Source: F5, 2023
Organizations increasingly welcome IT's input into how their services can improve the customer experience, identify new lines of business, and increase efficiencies. CIOs are in a good position to demonstrate IT value.
Overarching insight
It's no longer enough to build solutions. IT must reimagine its purpose and focus on providing IT services that deliver value to the enterprise.
| Insight 1 | Let go of traditional notions of what a service is. Services deliver value to customers. They are not solely applications or technology. | |
| Insight 2 | Services arise from and exist within an organizational ecosystem and as such they rely on a supportive culture to thrive. Remember that as a CIO you not only have tremendous influence over the culture but are also part of it as well. Identify, model, and reward service enabling behaviors. | |
| Insight 3 | IT leaders must take an outside-in approach when defining their IT services. Avoid the temptation to define IT services starting with IT and instead start with the enterprise customer. | |
| Insight 4 | You must tell your story. Ensure your service vision, your story of enterprise enablement, and your plans for change are brought to life in daily operations with a narrative that is remembered, repeated, and endorsed by your executives. |
A service is...
...all the activities, apps, processes, data, resources, and technology assembled into coherent, ready-to-use packages and delivered to individuals or businesses to address a need or enable them to do something. IT services take away the worry, costs, risks, and effort from the underlying technology.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 11 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Redefine services
- Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
- Call 2: Reset what a service is.
- Call 3: Understand customer and value.
Guided Implementation 2: Build your service-ready culture
- Call 1: The role of culture in supporting services.
- Call 2: Assess your cultural readiness.
Guided Implementation 3: Envision and identify your services
- Call 1: Complete service vision.
- Call 2: Identify customers.
- Call 3: Identify business services.
- Call 4: Identify and align IT services.
Guided Implementation 4: Communicate to your executives
- Call 1: Draft executive presentation.
- Call 2: Finalize and practice executive presentation.
Contributors
- Roy Atkinson, CEO and Principal Advisor, Clifton Butterfield, LLC
- David Barrow, Founder, Service Management Consultant, Author, and Speaker
- Patti Blackstaffe, Co-Founder and CEO, GlobalSway
- Phyllis Drucker, Industry Thought Leader and President, EZ2BGR8 Service Management
- Seema Gupta, Transformation Manager, Definity Financial Corporation
- Stephen Lumini, Professional Services Principal Architect BMC Software Canada
- Katrina MacDermid, Entrepreneur and award-winning author
- Cynthia Taylor, Director of Delivery Management, EPAM Systems
- Doug Tedder, Owner and Principal Consultant, Tedder Consulting LLC
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Create a Service Management Roadmap
Elevate Your Service Capabilities to Drive Enterprise Value
Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog
Create an IT View of the Service Catalog
Initiate Your Service Management Program
Develop Meaningful Service Metrics
IT Service Management Selection Guide
Service Management Integration With Agile Practices
Define Your Enterprise IT and Digital Services
