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Chapter 4 ■ Service Strategy
IT must be tightly aligned with the business to ensure that the business gets what it needs.
Governance helps IT service providers achieve this alignment. In fact, governance is
perhaps the only thing that brings the customer and the service provider under the same
umbrella and achieves synchronization.
The alignment is brought about by defining common vision, policies, processes, and
the governance structure for regular engagements.
Governance ensures the service provider’s strategy is in sync with the customer.
It ensures that there are sufficient touch points and control mechanisms to define the
processes, roles, responsibilities, and measurements. They police the implemented
processes for compliance and adherence.
The lack of governance leads to chaos. The business does not get what it wants,
because the policies and processes would not be defined based on its needs. It would be
a matter of time before things start to wrap up and end the business relationship. In the
IT service management world, lack of a proper governance model has been identified as
the major reason for failure to deliver on contractual obligations, leading to loss of the
customer base.
4.8 Service Strategy Processes
There are five service strategy processes in the ITIL 2011 version. These processes
are aligned to the service strategy phase’s objectives and are aimed toward providing
guidance for the service provider to strategize, govern, and manage the outcome of the
services. However, for the ITIL foundation examination, three processes are in scope:
• Service portfolio management
• Financial management for IT services
• Business relationship management
I have touched on some concepts pertaining to the two processes that are omitted
from the ITIL Foundation syllabus in the preceding sections. These processes are:
• Strategy management for IT services: I explained the concept of
value that comes out of this process.
• Demand management: Patterns of the business activity concept
are tagged under this process.
All the service strategy processes will come into play across the service lifecycle,
although it has been explicitly mentioned under the service strategy phase.
4.8.1 Service Portfolio Management
A portfolio is a collection of assets. A financial portfolio is a familiar term where in all
the assets we own, such as shares, money in the bank, and bonds, among others, are
collectively addressed by the term. Likewise, in the IT service management world, a
service provider’s assets are the services that it has in its repertoire. These services are
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