Service Consumers and Customers

"Great service is what the Customer thinks it is.”

Multiple Customer Roles
In a given situation, the relationship between an IT Provider such as ebcIT and its' Client(s) can assume one of three forms:

Customers and Providers do not share a common view of service
- A frequent misunderstanding in IT departments is to equate a system as a service. The customer sees a service as something from which they gain a benefit. The IT provider sees systems as physical artifacts and often organizes itself accordingly. The customer may define a single 'service' as many 'services' from the IT providers' vantage. The 'services' provided by IT often require the joint efforts of many IT disciplines to deliver. While the service level manager defines what they are, the IT resources required to deliver them, and those that the customer actually uses, it is the customer's definition of service which defines end-to-end performance expectations and is the formalization described by Service Level Agreements. Services, which are accessed to accomplish these "end-to-end" customer requirements, consist of "service chains" - integrated collections of internal systems and activities, governed by agreements and performance expectations amongst the participants.

"Great" Service
Once customers have been clearly identified, it is important to understand what great (ie. value) means to them. Most situations feature two types of value: Explicit desires - needs that they can describe when they know what they want in a good or service. The other is: Latent desires - when customers know that they have a problem, but they may be unable to describe the solution or even the problem. A good provider knows its' customers well and anticipates their needs by viewing itself as a partner. It can determine what they want almost before they know nit themselves.

This gives rise to the following definitions which will be referenced through the remainder of this description:

Consumers and Customers have different expressions of Value. To Consumers Value = Performance. To Customers (ie., Ministry management) Value is described as a ratio of performance to cost - ie. Value = performance/cost.

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A Catalogue

The service catalogue defines this "service chain" by identifying component systems and services involved in the delivery of the total (ie., end-to-end), customer-centric service offering. The ebc Service Catalogue will list all of the technology services being provided to ebc "consumers". The descriptions will include a summary of their characteristics and identify the consumers' characteristics. It will specify responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of the service as well as business functions and their relationship to the IT processes and resources needed to provide for proper support.

Distinguishing IT services by developing a Catalogue and documenting the delivery methods and conditions forces an organization to rationalize, specify and detail those offerings against IT goals and strategic objectives. This results in the creation of a service hierarchy by identifying high level "Service Families" according to a logical framework reflective of those strategic goals.

There are three primary ways to distinguish the provision of IT services:

  1. By the Service Level
    Not all clients require the same service offerings and the realities of service costing necessitate distinguishing "basic" and "premium" services.

    Some services will have both Basic and Premium components depending on some measure of how the service is delivered. These will usually reflect speed of restoration, improved response and/or greater reliability. In some situations, an entire service may constitute a premium offering functionally distinct from any Basic Service(s).

  2. By Purpose
     Service Managers must understand their client's needs well to provide good customer service. The most widely accepted model of IT service delivery is the Utility Model. based upon the provision of hydro, there are five distinct facets to service delivery:

    1. Connecting to the IT Service - gaining access to the service and usually covering modifications to it such as moving outlets and disconnecting,
    2. Keeping the lights On - operating and safeguarding the availability of the service,
    3. Keeping the lights bright - ensuring service is provided through planning and ongoing management of capacity planning and extending the reach and range of IT services - that is making them increasingly available to any customer, from anywhere and at any time.
    4. Recovery when the IT service fails - ensuring restoration of IT service as quickly as possible
    5. Lowering the cost of the service - administrative and research services devoted to finding more cost-effective delivery methods

    Organizing service delivery into one of these five "families" will have clear and unambiguous meaning (since everyone now understands and probably accepts the "Utility" model) to all three kinds of customers.

  3. By service stability
    A distinction based upon the stability of the IT infrastructure. The delivery of services which never change can be perfected over time, but, change is inevitable and, though it often provides opportunities for enhanced performance and stability, can tax an organization's ability to adapt and manage change in an efficient manner.

    This distinction separates Maintenance from Development services. Maintenance is safeguarding the current state of the system while development involves the introduction of upgrades and enhancements, expanding functionality and/or performance.

Service Principles

Customer-centric services should have some implicit characteristics
  1. Customer Relevance
    Services must be of value to the customers, packaged at a functional level, and expressed in the customer's terms. In other words, a service must be defined in terms of "what it provides" rather than "how it is produced". This implies isolating the lower level of details of the capabilities and activities (ie., system characteristics) from the customers while still providing visibility.
  2. End-to-end Performance Expression
    A service should be identifiable by the Consumer in accordance with performance expectations. There should be no "caveats" expressed in performance measures. For example, network response is at the desktop as experienced by the user and is without reference to the service participants and the individual system responses which collectively result in the overall response to the Consumer. It is the responsibility of the Service Provider to ensure that individual targets collectively contribute towards meeting overall service targets
  3. Pick-And-Choose
    The services must be selectable. Subscription to a service by a customer should not require buy-in of other services which are not relevant to the customer.
  4. Plug-And-Play
    The use of any Basic service must be based on definitions which appear in the ebc Service Catalogue. Once a service, as it exists in the Services Catalogue, is subscribed to, it must be readily available for use by the customer. It should not require any implementation effort beyond interface testing, configuration setup, and parameter table updates, by the service provider.
  5. Service Control
    Consumer and customer obligations as participants in the service chain must be clear.
  6. Interoperability
    Services will be standardized, whenever applicable, to enable comparison with other service providers.
  7. Performance Accountability
    Performance of each individual service will be measurable and reportable. Measurement should encompass aspect of "good customer service" including acknowledgement of requests, standard actionings and length of time for task completion. Recognizing that exceptional cases will always exist which involve consideration often outside the control of the service provider there should be provision for permissable variance (expressed as a percentage of instance).
  8. Cost Accountability
    Services will be provided to a customer either through an annual appropriation granted to ebc as approved by Cluster and Ministry management or on a time-and-material basis. This means all standard services will be defined, structured, and priced in such a way that customers' recurrent costs can be visible.
 

Service Breakdown by Family

Availability: "keeping the lights on"

Capacity: "lighting - bright, anywhere, anytime""

  • Capacity Planning - Ensuring ebc continues to have enough capacity to meet current and future requirements. This includes:
    • regular workstation and server refresh
    • participation in bandwidth planning
    • ensuring ebc interests are represented on central government, intra-ebc and external management forms
    • architectural planning
  • Usage Monitoring and Forecasting

  • Mobile Services - extending capacity by increasing the reach of service or usage

Connection: Turning the lights on

  • Service Requests - password resets, equipment MACs
  • Project Management - support for IT projects
  • Release Management - product test and build services, release to production,

Restoration: "Turning the lights back on"

  • Incident Management - password resets, equipment MACs
  • Change Management - introducing changes

Efficiency: "Lowering the costs of lighting"

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Service Catalogue Descriptions

Objectives
 The "targets" for this service over the near, medium and long term. Targets may be "strategic" (positioning of the service in alignment with I&IT objectives) or metric (measurable performance indicators). Objectives should indicate how well the service is to be delivered now, and in the future and methods to close any performance gaps. Any existing service standards which the organization is expected to strive towards should be discussed here.

Activities
Activities are specific types or classes of work which need to be performed in order for the service to be delivered. Some activities may be integral to the service chain and specific to a uniquely identifiable service partner (eg., network provision). Others may reflect an identifiable service level (eg., premium support).

Activities can be reconstituted as a unique service within a Service Family. Thus the organization can increase the sophistication of its' services over time by "fleshing out" activities into Services.

It should be understood, however, that constituting "Activities" as "Services" has implications for measurement. Performance metrics must be meaningful to the Customer and provide a meaningful service from their perspective. Not all activities performed as part of a wider service offering will provide a meaningful "line of service encounter" (LSE) and thus conform to the principles of Customer Relevance or Pick-and-Choose.

Dependencies
For a service to be provided successfully there may be certain conditions which must be met or activities which must be undertaken or completed. Many ebc IT services, for example, will be dependent upon the existence of a Wide Area Network and the associated services which go into supporting it.
Partner Obligations
Dependencies often result in service obligation by a service partner. It is important to specify the obligations upon which a service is dependent. The ways in which the obligations might be breached and the implications of the failures on meeting performance expectations should be discussed.
Customer Obligations
Processes that generate services are different from those in which goods are manufactured. In the latter case the production process generally takes place at one time and in one place, the customer is not present, nor does he/she take part in the process as a co-producer (Edvardsson, 1998). The customer is present and affects the result in terms of added value and quality. If we assume that customers are co-producers, this means that they are either an asset or a 'disruptive factor'. The role, participation and responsibility of the customer in service production must therefore be made clear. It can be concluded that service organizations do not provide services but rather the prerequisites for various services. An organization does not deliver services but opportunities for services. The goal of service development is as such: to provide the best and right prerequisites for well-functioning customer processes - for instance, the technical resources, the administrative routines and procedures, which customers must understand and use.

Financing
The cost and methods of financing the service should be mentioned. If the service is provided as part of an overall annual appropriation to the IT provider some effort should be devoted to estimating the capital, start-up and operating costs of the service. This permits a comparison of Return on Investment (ROI) from the services offered by the Provider.

Where costs are recovered (typically as part of a premium service offering) the costs of various level of premium service should be itemized. details of any charge-back scheduled and methods should be listed for the service.

Performance
Performance targets for the end-to-end service are presented. These metrics should reflect the end-to-end service expression as experienced by the Consumer of the service without direct reference to intermediate or technical measures which comprise elements of the overall performance. These latter measures might be cited in Appendeces in a description of the service chain or Partner Obligations which express the complexities of meeting performance bonds.

How a measure is determined and any assumptions implicit in its' use should be discussed. There should be some discussion as to what would constitute a significant variance which would trigger management attention.

There might be more than a single expression of performance depending upon any levels (eg. Basic, premium) at which the service is offered.

There should be the ability to reference and review actual performance against Targets as well as accompanying explanations and remedial actions undertaken to correct significant gaps.

Contacts
Accountability should be identified for the maintenance of the Service Catalogue describing the service and for meeting overall performance.

Additional Information
This section would identify any additional information sources to find related and/or more detailed descriptive material.

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Relationship to SLAs

The Service Catalogue describes all the IT offerings of the Service Provider. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents the contractual (implied or explicit) level at which those services will be provided to respective Customers. Note that in organization's such as ebc the Customer for SLA discussions is Ministry management - the payer for the service.

A Service Catalogue allows much of the material in an SLA to be referenced rather than included in the agreement. By separating service description (Catalogue) from the negotiation (SLA) elements the Catalogue positions control over service components of the SLA with the Provider. It makes it easier to maintain these descriptions and renders the SLA itself a more compact and focused document.

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Appendix

A. Major IT Systems
Public Facing Systems - products produced service the public
  • www.cbs.gov.on.ca
  • www.ofrb.gov.on.ca
  • www.lat.gov.on.ca
  • www.personalproperty.gov.on.ca
  • www.addresschange.gov.on.ca
  • www.ontariocanada.com
  • www.est.gov.on.ca
  • www.pubont.stores.gov.on.ca/pool/english/default.asp
  • ESDi applications involving public interactions
Customer Facing Systems - products produced service businesses which service the public
  • ESI Gateway for Individuals
  • Integrated Address Change
  • ESDi Transactions
  • CATS
  • OFRB (Ontario Film Review Board)
  • PPSR
  • OBC Clearinghouse
  • Master Business License
  • MyBis - Subscribe & Unsubscribe
  • OCMS
  • Business Immigration
  • Client Account Management
  • Client Management (OEI)
  • Global Traders Nominee
  • Global Traders Registration
  • Vikara - TEAM
  • external e-mail delivery/receipt down
  • Gazette Invoicing
  • MOL Inspector Notebook Data Synchronization
  • Enhanced Business Name Search
  • Self-Help Workstation
  • ccPay
  • Business Bundling
  • JefForm
  • eLAWS
  • Blue Pages
  • PACE
  • Wholesaler Connectivity
  • Program Engagement Self Assessment Wizard
  • RIMS
  • Ministry Directory
  • Wisdom Exchange
  • ONBIS (Business Registration)
  • VSIS
  • Program Engagement Self-Assessment Wizard
  • Business Number Update Services
  • Business Number Update Services
  • PRIME
  • POOL (Publications Ontario On-Line)
  • Minister's House Book
  • OCMS - Correspondence tracking
  • Exchange e-mail system
  • Domain Server failure
  • Network failure
  • Internet access failure
  • Acquisition Tracking
  • Application Usage History
  • Business Awards
  • Client Stakeholder Directory
  • Community Economic Profiles
  • Document Library
  • OEI Activity Reporting
  • PTAC Meeting Discussion
  • Service Request
  • Summer Company, My Company
  • Survey System
  • UED Resource Centre
  • CEDR Website (Game board)
Customer Supporting Systems - products produced service IT interests which service businesses which service the public
  • Remedy Service Desk, Change and Service Level management systems
  • Security Application failure - Card Access System
  • Bell Mobility Paging system
This site maintained by ebcIT Service Management