“Any idea what a service is?”

Just imagine you don’t have a solid answer to that question. Or imagine that different answers are given within your organization…

How would you respond to the following question:

 “And how do you think you will manage your services?”

Anyone who does not have a clear answer to the first question or (as a consequence) to the second question, would do well to think about this subject. But let me warn you – it’s a bumpy road ahead…

 Facility Management

In the search for a SMART definition of “service”, we might start with the field of Facility Management, where services should be core business.

• IFMA’s FMpedia, the free online glossary of facility management terms, doesn’t even provide a definition of “service”… the only term that approaches it is “Service delivery: The process of getting facilities-related services, such as planning, design, operations, maintenance, and work order processing, to a tenant or customer. See also project delivery.” The IFMA fails here big time.
• Perhaps the latest ISO 41000 standard Facility Management will help us. ISO 41011 contains the Facility Management Vocabulary and tells us “Service: time-perishable, intangible activity performed by an entity”. Very incomplete, focusing only at the human interaction. Fail.

Textbooks

Perhaps the textbooks used in FM education will help us out. Take for example the leading textbooks “Facility management” that are used at the colleges of higher education in the Netherlands, for the Facility Management courses:

• Service Management, An Integrated Approach [Gemmel c.s., 2013], a leading textbook by the Service Management Centre of the Vlerick Leuven Ghent Management School says “producing definitions of services is not an easy task”. After looking at definitions of various scholars, they conclude with the following definition: “Service: all those economic activities that are intangible and imply an interaction to be realized between service provider and consumer”. This denies services in non-economic environments, or services that are only partly intangible. In short: a very limited definition, and definitely not SMART.
• Facility Management [Maas & Pleunis, 2006] tells us “Services are processes and consist of consecutive contacts between customers and suppliers” and “A service is a human interaction that unfolds in the here and now.”. Again a very limited view that says that services are human activities. Not operational. And not SMART.
• The Facility Management Handbook [1994] says “Service: Provide support to the organization and its employees, clients and patients in such a way that, given predetermined conditions, they can function optimally.” That sounds nice, but again: not operational, no specific structure, no measurability except an implicit reference to customer satisfaction. Again: not SMART.
• Basisboek Facility Management [Drion & Van Sprang, 2015] doesn’t provide a single definition and says “Most facility services are performed in the form of a process and take place continuously.” Not only is that again incorrect (“services are process”), but this definition also is not operational; especially because there are no definitions of those processes provided in the same textbook. The definition focuses on the human activity component of the service. And again: not SMART.

In the Facility Management field, therefore, it is apparently not entirely clear what a service is. That is a remarkable conclusion that I will elaborate on in another blog.

But there are many more definitions. For example in IT, where IT Service Management has a long history. Would any one of the definitions in ITSM indeed be SMART? And what would that mean for your organization? Read on…

 So what about IT?

Let’s see if IT textbooks do any better, starting with the popular IT Service Management framework of ITIL:

• ITIL says “Service: Delivering value to the customer by facilitating the outcomes that customers want to achieve without ownership of specific costs and risks.” Ever seen a more vague definition? Not operational. And definitely not SMART.

 Maybe a framework for Business Information Management does better:

• BiSL may offer a solution. To be sure, let’s take the latest version, BiSL-Next: “Service: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating the outcomes that they want to achieve.” This definition was largely copied from ITIL, therefor again: not operational and not SMART.

Maybe some of the other popular frameworks provide a better answer:

• VeriSM says “Service: Fulfillment of a defined consumer need”. Sounds great, but unfortunately very abstract, not operational and definitely not SMART.
• COBIT 5’s glossary unfortunately shines in the absence of the term “service”. In the book, however, we do find the following: “IT service: The day-to-day provision to customers of IT infrastructure and applications and support for their use.” That is getting closer – as you might expect from auditors. Concrete components, and a holistic approach. Still limited to IT, but on the right track.

 COBIT provides the first indication of a SMART and operational definition.

 But what about science?

What does science say about this?

• Service systems theory. A frequently publishing professor in that discipline writes the following: “Services are activities or groups of activities performed to produce or facilitate benefits for others.” [Steven Alter, 2 University of San Francisco, USA 2017]. Ough. You would expect something more from scientists … Certainly because there is a very strong school in modern science: service-dominant logic (S-D logic), as a follow-up to a goods-dominant logic (G-D logic). In this line of thought it is stated that “everything” is service, and that the industry/economy is going through a major shift, with goods being offered almost exclusively in a service format. It is all the more astonishing that no clear statement is made about the elementary definition of the term “service”. It only describes the activity component of services. Definitely not operational and not SMART.
• S-D Logic then? Let’s see what the godfathers of the S-D logic, Stephen Vargo & Robert Lusch, tell us: “In S-D logic, service is defined as the application of specialized competences (…) through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself ” [Vargo & Lusch, 2008]. A rather unfortunate version of the activity-focused definitions we’ve seen before. And still not SMART.

To top it off (and of course that is not allowed, but still) we look for a definition in Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia says “A service is defined as non-physical goods in the economy.” Non-physical goods? Think about that … ‘non-physical goods’ … let’s not waste another word on that. Too silly to take serious. And again not SMART.

Perhaps other standards will help?

Perhaps the ISO or IEC standards help us out to get more grip on the definition? Well – if you have the courage to plough through 100 ISO and IEC definitions, please be my guest. These sometime horrifying definitions – provided by an organization that should have a serious track record in terms of standardization…. – include variations like ‘result of activities’, ‘capability’, ‘output of an organization’, ‘product’, ‘activities’, ‘system’, ‘output’, ‘functions’, ‘means of delivering value’, ‘supplies’, ‘beneficial performance’, ‘specific behavior’, ‘software’, ‘information stream, etc. etc. Again: horrifying and unbelievable inconsistent.

Conclusion

All of these resources contain different and sometimes conflicting definitions of ‘service’. And all those definitions are not Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic, and Time-bound or – and let’s add two more important additional criteria – Manageable and Reportable (SMMARRT).

How is that possible?

That is not so difficult to explain. All the sources mentioned are heavily practice-driven, even the academic sources that might have been expected to be more theoretical. This means that they mainly describe routines based on the experience of a practice that is found somewhere. These practices have emerged and were not designed, certainly not from a clear architecture, which makes them incomplete and insufficiently coherent.

Then what to do?

Every problem has a solution, but we should first and for all follow Einstein here:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

So we have to look at the problem from a fundamentally different perspective. That can be done by means of the methodical approach of USM (Unified Service Management). USM defines a service management architecture that is built on principles instead of practices.

If we take the relationship between customer and provider as a starting point for a service (everyone agrees on that), then a service always comes down to the following:

1. A provider makes a facility available to a customer.
2. The customer uses this facility for his own business.
3. Using that facility, the customer is supported by the provider.
4. The facility is always composed of a combination of goods and actions.
5. The service can be characterized by its functionality (what the user can do with it) and by its functioning (how well that goes), and that applies to both the “facility” component and the “support” component.

This leads to a new and extremely simple definition of service, and the shortest one you’ll ever find:

A service is a supported facility

Service delivery can then be defined as simply as “the provision of a supported facility” (or if you prefer: “the provision and support of a facility”).

And that does lead to a SMMARRT definition of both service and service management…

Just test it…

Apply that definition to a random service, and you will see that this definition is universally correct. Whether it’s about catering, human resources, building management, information provision, fleet management or anything else. The definition consists of service building blocks, included the service management architecture of the USM method (Unified Service Management, or if you prefer: Universal Service Management). It is operational, in the sense that it provides leads for the specification of all components covered in the definition, making it ultimately SMMARRT – as demonstrated in USM.

Do you want to know more?

• …about the effects of redefining the concept of service in your own organization, whether that is IT or any other Facility Management discipline, or even your primary business activities?
• …about the way you can draft or revise simple and comprehensible SLAs?
• …about the way you subsequently make your services much easier to manage or too report?
• …about the way you organize your service catalog and your customer portal much tighter?
• …about the way you can make your service reporting meaningful?
• …about the way you can adjust your tool accordingly?

Then read the free e-book on USM: download it here.

Once you’ve done that, you may want to look one step further. E.g. how to make a success of ITIL 4 (or any other ITIL version), using USM.

You may even want to embark on a two-day USM Foundation, to understand the architecture of service management, so your improvement initiatives consistently contribute to a clear goal and you learn how to deploy any combination of best practices.

After USM you’ll never see Service Management through the same eyes…

[Editorial comment, March 7: one of the responses in the many discussions that emerged from postings on this blog, led me to add the following comment……….. There is only one thing we define as ‘water’, but there are many flavors of it. Nevertheless, water is always H2O. End of story. Whatever ITIL says. Whatever any practice or infrastructure expert says. Ergo: service is service, but there are many flavors. The question I analyzed in my blog is the question “What is a service in terms of its fundamental structure, its ‘H2O’ composition?”. The answer was as simple as the H2O definition of water: “A service is ‘a supported facility’, no more, no less”, a universal definition that can be applied to any context where a provider delivers a service to a customer (the origin of the term service).]