Lesson 03: Key Concepts and Building Blocks of ITIL

We will review a few key concepts in this lesson. Familiarity with these concepts helps you understand other topics.

00:06 – So, welcome back. We’re going to start taking ITIL key concepts and understanding those building blocks that you need to know about.
00:16 – Key concepts matter a lot because they give us those blocks, the building blocks, that we can use to build buildings for our world.
00:25 – When we played with Lego bricks and blocks and wooden toys as a child, no matter the commonality of the building blocks, we all built our own things, and we still need to do that.
00:39 – We need to understand these concepts.
00:41 – We’re going to use terminology and words and you’re going to be expected to obviously remember those words because they’re helpful for talking to other people about them.
00:51 – The ITIL terminology, but the terminology is not the point, the concept is.
00:56 – So, we need to understand the landscape that we’re sitting in, and we need to use those concepts and those basic building blocks to build the right thing for us.
01:05 – So, there’s quite a few key concepts that we’re going to talk about.
01:08 – We’re not going to do them all in one lesson.
01:11 – In this lesson, we’re going to talk about service things, things with the word “service” in.
01:17 – Now, clearly we’re talking about Service Management, so that’s a very good place to start, and it’s a sensible thing to get out of the way first.
01:24 – And the very most obvious thing related to service that we should define is the word “service.” So, let’s look at the definition of a service.
01:34 – ITIL tells us that a service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.
01:50 – Now, some of those terms in there are actually concepts in their own right that we’re going to look at in more detail later, most significantly Value.
02:00 – So, value is going to be talked about in the next lesson, but you can see what it generally means, something useful to somebody.
02:08 – It facilitates outcomes, and we’re going to make it very clear in a later lesson the difference between outcome and output.
02:17 – The last bit is something we may well pick up now.
02:20 – Without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.
02:24 – That sounds like a sort of little bit tacked on at the end, but let me give you an example of why it matters to make something a service.
02:32 – Imagine you’re on the way to the airport in a nice big E-class Mercedes in comfort.
02:38 – I’m making this up, so we may as well be comfortable.
02:42 – Is that a service? Well, it depends.
02:45 – If that Mercedes is your car and it breaks down on the way to the airport, you have to do something about it.
02:54 – You have to phone the dealer or get the breakdown service out or change the wheel yourself or whatever it is.
03:01 – You own the costs and risks. That is not a service, but if it’s an identical car, but it’s a taxi, then that is a service because if that Mercedes breaks down on the way to the airport, then you just sit there, confident that the taxi service will deal with it because they have taken the specific costs and risks associated with that journey.
03:24 – That’s a service.
03:26 – So, that’s why that definition has that phrase on the end of it and it’s important to make it a service.
03:34 – It’s based on a range of products, probably a configuration of different products, and it will be used to create service offerings.
03:44 – Service offerings will be components based upon these things, and we’re going to look at those extra service words as we go through this little section.
03:53 – So, service offering, let’s think about a service offering.
03:56 – It’s a description of one or more services that are designed to address the needs of a particular group of people, a target consumer group if you like, and it includes or may include various components, and ITIL uses these terms to help us see the components of a service offering and the importance of it to our customers and our users.
04:21 – Those components are goods, access to resources, and service actions. So, let’s think about them.
04:28 – First of all, let’s look at goods. Nice, simple, more tangible things, and in a service offering, goods are something that is actually transferred to the consumer, you know.
04:39 – I want to buy a mug to drink my coffee from, so I … part of the service is I get the mug and it’s mine, ownership is transferred to me, it’s now my mug.
04:51 – The consumer therefore takes responsibility for future use.
04:54 – Drop it on the hard floor, it breaks, it’s your responsibility to do something about it.
05:00 – So, goods are transferred across as part of a service offering. Access to resources, other person’s resources.
05:09 – So, you have access granted to them.
05:12 – In business, in fancy terms at work, you may have a license or a contractual set of conditions to allow you access to that.
05:22 – In a domestic life, you’re buying a ticket to go into a building, a museum or whatever it is.
05:28 – You don’t own the museum, but you have right granted to it.
05:33 – It’s for today only or maybe it’s for a year, different conditions in different circumstances, but ownership is not passed to you, the right to use it is.
05:42 – You’re drinking coffee at a restaurant or a cafeteria, you get to use the cup, but you don’t get to keep it. So, access to resources.
05:54 – The third part is service actions, actions performed by the provider to address a consumer need, and they should be certainly performed in accordance with the agreement that you have.
06:08 – Let’s think of an example. You go for a massage. You get the benefits from it.
06:13 – It’s based upon actions performed by other people.
06:18 – There’s no access to other resources, there’s no access to physical goods, but it’s definitely a service, something you’re willing to pay for, something you get value from.
06:28 – So, performed in agreement, whether that’s a tacit agreement where it’s just sort of accepted, or whether it’s some kind of contractual term again.
06:36 – So, a service offering will typically comprise all three of those things.
06:42 – Again, we think of the coffee, you have the mug, sometimes you get to take it away, you get to drink it, you have access to it.
06:48 – You get to sit in the cafeteria while you’re drinking things to try and stay there all day.
06:53 – They will suggest you leave because you’ve breached the terms of that contract, even though it’s not written.
07:01 – We’re doing Service Management, and Service Management is defined as a set of specialized organizational capabilities to enable value for customers in the form of services.
07:13 – Now, we’ve looked at services, we’re going to look at what customers need.
07:16 – Organizational capabilities are what we have to allow us to do it.
07:21 – So, Service Management is actually managing those services, pretty obvious really when you think about it, but it’s important that services are managed.
07:29 – If they’re not managed, they will not do their job.
07:31 – So, Service Management is that set of capabilities that we need to do that.
07:38 – We’re going to do that and in doing that, we’re going to build a relationship.
07:43 – We’re going to build some kind of cooperation between the people who provide the service, the service provider, and the people who consume the service, the service consumer.
07:55 – So, a service relationship will include the provision of a service, the consumption of the service and the relationship between those two players, the consumer and the provider.
08:10 – So, that’s crucially important. We all understand service relationships, whether it’s a very simple one between us and the waiter in the restaurant we go to, or whether it’s between a massive IT department with thousands of people delivering key services to a multinational business. The concept is exactly the same.
08:32 – And we provide that service.
08:35 – The service provider performs activities in order to deliver that service, and again, remember this is a value chain and a hierarchy going on.
08:44 – We’re dependent on the services we receive in order to deliver the services to our service consumer, who in turn will be delivering services to their service consumer.
08:56 – So, we’ve talked about service provision, we’ve talked about service consumption, and the service consumer has to manage resources as well to use the service, to consume the goods, utilize the resources that they’re having access to or taking possession of.
09:15 – It’s not something that you just do.
09:18 – There has to be conscious effort on the part of the service consumer to make this work because this is a relationship, so it depends upon relationship management.
09:28 – It depends on the provider managing their service provision, it depends upon the server managing their service consumption, and it depends on them working together to establish a service relationship because unless there is that relationship, unless there is a meeting and a gelling of the provision and the consumption of the service, then the service will not do what it’s supposed to do.
09:54 – It will not be as good as it should be.
09:57 – So, that’s really an important consideration that we’re talking about here.
10:01 – We’ve talked about various things with the word “service” in front of them.
10:06 – It’s really important that we see those as part of a bigger, single, integrated picture, or if you don’t like the word picture, then it’s probably not the best word.
10:17 – Maybe the best word is model, and that’s the term I shall use, is a service relationship model.
10:24 – When services are delivered by the provider, they give you that foundation and resources for the consumer to turn those into a service provision to their consumer.
10:37 – So, it’s a chain that moves forward.
10:40 – It allows the service consumer to become a provider in their own right.
10:44 – We are all of us service consumers, all of us service providers.
10:50 – So, we’ve seen a lot of terms here with the word “service” in them.
10:55 – That’s not accidental, of course. This is Service Management, so you would hope to see a lot of words with service in, but hopefully what you’ve got from this lesson is that they’re not multiple discrete things that we need to learn about.
11:10 – They’re aspects of being in this service management role or being in this service consumption role. We’re all both.
11:19 – We need to see how these elements of service fit together and our role in it.
11:25 – It’s the integration, the coordination that makes this work.
11:28 – And why are we doing services?
11:31 – We’re doing services to deliver value, and value is probably ITIL’s most important word.
11:39 – The concept of value is immensely valuable to us, and we’re going to look at that concept and what value means in our terms, and what value should mean to our customers in the next lesson.

Do you remember the example of the ride to the airport and the way it may or may not be a service depending on the way it’s done? Can you give similar examples?

Do you remember the special perspective of ITIL on how value is created?

The idea is that value is “co-created”. Can you find examples of value co-creation in your life?

Lesson 03: Key Concepts and Building Blocks of ITIL

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