In the era of service orientation, some companies now have hundreds, in some cases, thousands of services under their roofs. How many are duplicates? How many are outmoded, or broken?
Toufic Boubez provides insights into the value of service portfolio management, which seeks to ensure that people spend their time and energy with not just the right enterprise services, but also a sustainable and maintainable level of services.
The key to all this: get the business involved in identifying what really matters, Toufic says. "A good service portfolio planning process can help to
de-politicize the selection or rejection of IT projects," he says. Behind every good Service Portfolio should be input and sign-off from the CEO and other senior executives, he adds.
There are two levels of activity that go into Service Portfolio Management, he explains: the Business Service Model, and the Service Portfolio itself.
The Business Service Model, he explains, "is an abstract representation of how an organization conducts its business operations, which describes the workings of part or all of the organization in terms of a set of business services." Keep in mind that this phase is abstract, he says.
The Service Portfolio itself, on the other hand, "is a real physical object, consisting of the set of services from the business service model that are planned to be or have already been physically realized in the form of software assets."
Once a service is planned, it spends its entire lifecycle in the Service Portfolio -- until the day it's retired.
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