IT Services. Professional IT Services. IT outsourcing. Part four

Part Four

At the current stage of technology development none of the IT services can operate without people. There are two main reasons for this:

1. technical components eventually fail and need maintenance;
2. IT services are used by one person but are designed by the other peoples. Theose people in turn are unpredictable to each other:
• they do not always behave predictably;
• they can be unpredictably wrong;
• their needs may vary unpredictably.

To be more precise, different people can predict the behavior of others with varying degrees of accuracy and with different time horizons. No one can predict it with a 100% accuracy and a horizon over a couple of years. As a result, over time, more and more life situations cannot be processed with systems that support the IT services.

As a consequence, an IT service should be complemented by people in order to:

• restore its operation after a technical failure and environmental change;
• assist in the resolution of error situations in business processes;
• design the IT service;
• implement changes in the IT service.

To meet the requirement for people the owner of the IT Service has two options:

• keep competent people on staff;
• use professional IT services.

If it is decided to engage professional services, the next challenge will be to identify a set of required services.

Given the fact that the core value of professional services lies in the availability of specially trained experts with high levels of competence, the obvious way of categorizing is the division of services by areas of competence. On the ICL Services website this approach is used to categorize the services in the menu and on the Services page.

Often it can be difficult to choose one of the services defined in this way. The categorization of the assets of an IT service that is maintained by corresponding professional services can help here. This approach is used on the ICL Services website on the Service Assistant page.

Since changes are significant for IT services, you can divide professional IT services by their relation to changes. Thus, they can be divided into:

• IT consulting services — services that are used in order to understand and decide what and how to change;
• Services for IT projects — services that are used to perform certain significant changes (for example, a service for migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 or software development service) and
• IT operation services — services that are used to solve permanent problems over a long period of time, including minor changes (eg, Windows 7 workplace support or application maintenance and support).

«What about the IT outsourcing services?» you may ask.

For more details see our blog on Megamozg.