1. Service Descriptions in Higher Ed IT organizations
Susan Reese
2013 Enterprise IT Leadership Conference

2. ITIL Official ITIL Web site defines ITIL:
ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally.

3. What are service descriptions?
Service Summary
Features and Options
Service Provisioning
Operating Procedures
Platform Description
Financial Characteristics

4. Why IT departments don’t have service descriptions?
Time consuming to create.
Organization may not be “customer” or “business” oriented.
Are not tying IT objectives to business objectives.
IT is managing technical components instead of integrated services.

5. Benefits of developing service descriptions
Develop common language for defining services.
Helps identify what is standard and what is custom for a service.
Develop a deeper understanding internally of what IT services are offered by the entire organization (not just your part of IT).
Mechanism for thinking thru where there is shared support for a service and who owns responsibility for which pieces.
Clarifies what is really needed (resource wise) to support a service.
Describes the system architecture, including things not readily known like security practices and continuity plans with regards to the service

6. Benefits of developing service descriptions (continued)
Good basis for developing Service Level Agreements.
Foundation for making informed decisions about services (make or buy?; keep, change or stop?).
Focus on services that are most valuable to the organization.
Foundation for effective service management.

7. Benefits of sharing Service Descriptions
Defines a given service for the users.
Helps sets expectations.
Explains how to get support for a service.
Lets the users know who runs a given service.
Communicates characteristics of a service, clarifies who the services is intended for, standard vs custom parts of a services, etc.… and costs, if any, associated with the service.
Communicates the portfolio of services provided so the community is aware of all services that are readily available.

8. Director of Projects and Services
Questions
Susan Reese
Director of Projects and Services
Cal Poly Pomona