ITIL - Service Design Overview

Introduction

Service Design provides a blueprint for the services. It not only includes designing of new service but also devises changes and improvements to existing ones.

It also let the service provider know how the design capabilities for service management can be developed and acquired.

Balanced Design

It is necessary for services to be adaptable to changing business requirements on dynamic basis. For this a balance must be maintained between following three factors −

• Functionality with the required quality.
• Resources i.e. staff, technologies, and available finances.
• Timetable

Aspects of Service Design

Service Design focuses on the following aspects −

• IT Services designed to meet business objectives.
• Services designed to be both fit for purpose and fit for use.
• Cost of ownership planed to achieve return on investment.
• Balanced functionality, cost and performance.
• IT services more stable and more predictable.
• Potential risk mitigated, so the IT service is protected from security threats.
• Design technology architectures, management architectures, and system management tools.
• Design of the measurement systems, methods, and metrics for services, processes, architectures and underlying components.
• Design of the service solution including all agreed functional requirements, resources and capabilities.

Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to developing independent usable services. SOA is defined by Organization for the Advancement of Information Structured (OASIS). SOA provides more flexibility through modularity.

Prerequisites for SOA approach

Here the prerequisites required for implementation of SOA approach −

• Definition of services
• Clarity regarding interfaces and dependencies between services
• The application of standards for the development and definition of services
• Use of broadly-based technologies and tools.

Service Design Processes

Following table describes several processes in Service Design −

Sr.No.	Process & Description
1	Design Coordination It deals with maintaining policies, guidelines, standards, budget for service design activity.
2	Service Catalogue Management This process is responsible for designing service catalogue containing service specific to the customer for which they are willing to pay.
3	Service Level Management The goal of this process is to ensure quality of the services meet provisioned quality agreement
4	Capacity Management Capacity Management ensures optimal and economic usage of existing resources and future capacity requirement planning.
5	Availability Management Availability Management ensures the operative services meet all agreed availability goals.
6	IT Service Continuity Management This process ensures continuity of IT services regardless of any disaster occurs.
7	Information Security Management This process ensures confidentiality, integrity, availability of data.
8	Supplier Management This process ensures supplier relationship & performance and also ensures management of right and relevant contracts with supplier.