Understanding Elements of Service Design for Your Business

1. What are 5 services that should be offered?

Services provided by an organization are what create a sense of value to its stakeholders. So, services are essentially everything to an organization. Five services that should be offered are; data storage, IT hardware, IT consultation/Help Desk, network capabilities, and databases for analysis.

2. Who should each of these services be offered to?

The data storage service would be provided to the organization as a whole, but the IT department would be responsible for its maintenance and organization of the data. The IT hardware would be provided to all of the organization’s employees whom would be responsible for entering or retrieving any data. The IT consultation or Help Desk would be provided to the entire organization. This will assist all of the IT using stakeholders with assistance for minor IT issues they may encounter. Networking capability is a service that would connect the organization’s IT hardware together and allow the transfer of data across the network. Network service would be given to anyone utilizing IT hardware, but would most likely be maintained by the IT department. The database service will allow the organization to analyze the stored data. This would be given to either the IT department or a Quality Assurance department.

3. Who might compete with the internal IT department to provide each service?

Many times the IT department is met with third party vendors as competition for all of these services. Many organizations choose third party vendors because it contracts their services to an outside entity that saves them money because the organization doesn’t have to supply the contracted company’s benefits or hourly wages.

4. How would the service create value? How would each customer measure that value?

Data storage would provide storage for the organization’s valuable data. This can include transaction history, financial information, customer information, employee information, and so on. IT hardware would provide added efficiency to the employees entering data, and add accuracy to the data being entered for the organization. IT consultation or Help Desk, would add value to the end-user’s experience with using the equipment and software utilized by the organization. Having a network will add to the efficiency of data transfer. This would add value to the users by providing a conduit for data mobility. Having a database will create value by adding the ability of data analysis which can help the organization run more efficiently and even help them catch trends in their historical data to prevent future trends of the same nature.

5. What are the basic elements of a business case for the development and use of that system?

In a business case, you want accurate and easy to understand descriptions of the tasks being proposed, and you also want to essentially sell this by explaining the benefits of it, whether it be an immediate benefit or a long-term benefit. You want a thorough executive summary, clear objectives, define the current situation and define the intended future situation, provide possible alternatives, and a clear implementation plan.

6. How would the performance of the service be measured?

Each service would have its own definition of performance. The performance of the data storage would be measured by how accurately and efficiently the data was stored. The performance of the network service would be measured by how effectively the network connected each device to one another and how accurately and efficiently data was transferred through the network. The IT consultation or Help Desk’s performance would be measured by how helpful they were to the stakeholders requiring assistance and the rate at which they effectively solved the issues. The performance of the database would be measured by how accurate the information received from it was, and how helpful this information was to the organization’s growth.