Summary

This chapter covered the purpose, objectives, and scope of service operation and covered how people are grouped into functions to deliver the service. The importance of the service operation stage was covered; it is in this stage that the services deliver business value and the return on the investment of the earlier lifecycle stages is realized (or not!).

We covered which processes from other lifecycle stages require service operation action. We looked at the overlapping responsibilities of the operations management function with the technical management and application management functions. We covered the role and importance of the service desk in providing a single point of contact for IT for the business, together with the various service desk structures that may be suitable for different situations. We also considered the skills and attributes required for service desk staff members.

In the following chapters, we will be covering the major service operation processes of incident and problem management in some depth, and looking in less detail at the other processes of this lifecycle stage: access management, request management, and event management.