The Business services sector has experienced a huge growth in recent years, with companies outsourcing non-core services to save costs, gain access to more skills and expertise, and focus on their core competencies. The industry also benefits from new communication technologies and infrastructures that allow businesses to provide services in a more flexible way. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has made it more urgent than ever for businesses to develop and deliver essential business services that support organizations during challenging times.
A business service is a subset of the economic services category and includes intangible goods that help companies run their operations. These include consulting and management services, training and development, information technology, and even marketing and advertising services.
These intangible assets are not a tangible product that you can hold and inspect, but they offer many benefits to an organization such as streamlined processes, cost savings, increased productivity, and improved employee morale. Examples of a business service include a printing company that creates documents and publications for clients, a consulting firm that helps a company with marketing strategies, and a financial institution that offers top level strategy advice such as mergers and acquisitions.
Unlike goods, which can be stored and saved for future use, business services are delivered at the moment they are needed. Therefore, it is important to ensure that these intangible assets are properly managed and optimized at all times.
This is why business service mapping is an essential process in IT Service Management. When a service is not functioning efficiently, it can impact multiple business functions across the entire organization. This is because of the interconnected nature of these services. This is why it is important to have a detailed and comprehensive business service mapping process that takes into account the different elements of the architecture, including applications, hardware, network, and data.
The purpose of business service mapping is to create a complete picture of the services that are running within an organization. This allows the IT team to understand how these services are connected and what the effects will be if a service is down or not working properly. This information will then be used to manage these services. This could mean putting a budget toward retiring a service, upgrading it or moving it to the cloud.
Business service mapping is a complex process that requires collaboration between many different teams and departments. This can lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings, which can hinder the success of the project. Therefore, it is important to choose the right tools for business service mapping that will allow users to clearly visualize the services and their relationships.
ScienceLogic offers a powerful and easy-to-use business service mapping tool called Simplicable. This tool provides an overview of all the business, IT, and device services in your environment. It also displays the health, availability, and risk metrics for each service. Using this tool, you can easily identify the services that are critical to your business and quickly take action to prevent downtime and improve performance.