What is this?

Services?  Service Management?  Service Level?  Service Science?  IT Service Management?  What does it all mean?  Even more important, why should we care?

In truth, nobody really knows it all.  And if they do, these concepts are so abstract and obscure that they’re really hard to explain without using the same words over and over again until they loose all meaning.  I’m going to try and fix this problem by distilling these ideas down to their basic core and I’m going to do right here, out in the open, for all to see.

Frank Oppenheimer said, “The best way to learn is to teach.”  And I hope to learn a lot as I explore these ideas.  I suspect that I’ll wander a bit (sorry about that).

A word of caution: I came to this whole services thing from a technology perspective – IT to be exact.  I guess this makes sense due to the size, complexity, and cost of IT in general which forced faster maturation than in other service-providing organizations.  But this doesn’t need to be the case, I think I could have arrived here from any business discipline.  I’ll try to keep the references to IT-specific methodologies to a minimum.

Finally, services are big business with many companies telling you why their product is best.  I’ll try to sort through their promises and sort it all out.