Business services are the activities that a company undertakes to make its operations more effective. They are necessary for business enterprises to function efficiently and comprise banking, transportation, warehousing, insurance, communication, etc.
Business service providers are a highly diverse sector that includes professional services, education and training, and support and outsourcing. The industry is a crucial part of the economy, generating high levels of income and jobs.
The industry consists of about 420,000 establishments (single-location companies and units of multi-location companies) with combined annual sales of about $950 billion. The US business services sector has low barriers to entry and intense competition.
These businesses provide a wide range of business services including office space rental, real estate, utility services, security, and travel. They also offer services to help employees maintain a healthy work-life balance such as day care or fitness facilities.
How to launch digital business services
To start creating business services, identify a small set of typical transactions that you can use to demonstrate your service value. Then create a system of action for these services that will include processes and roles to ensure consistent and efficient delivery.
Define a baseline of processes for these services that are based on a common framework like ITIL, IT4IT, ISO, COBIT or TOGAF. This includes service creation, request and incident management, and knowledge management.
Create a system of business services for the use cases that you identified in Step 2. These services should be grouped by business unit, end user type or geography.
For example, a banking company that has offices around the world may want to create several device services that organize their devices by region or location. This will help them monitor the devices they have installed in different parts of the world and identify potential problems with their infrastructure before they arise.
Next, create multiple IT services that will monitor the devices in each device service. This will allow the banking company to identify issues with their infrastructure before they occur and respond quickly to them.
Once these IT services are in place, the company can create multiple business services that will monitor the devices and services related to each of its business units. For example, the company can create a retail banking business service that includes the IT services for online banking, teller systems and ATM networks.
After these services are in place, the company can assign a service owner to each of them and create processes for monitoring and managing these services. This will ensure that the service owner is accountable for the quality of the services delivered and that these services meet business needs.
Then, the service owner will be able to track their work and performance through dashboards. They can also access their metrics and report them to others in the organization.
Creating business services is simple in ServiceNow. You can begin by defining a set of services that you know you need to execute in order to achieve your business goals, such as employee office moves or customer order modifications. Then, you can create a process for delivering these services through the Service Portal. Finally, you can select one or more services as favorites so they always display at the top of the list on the Business Services page.