Each service in an Enterprise will be treated like a product in Digital World , that is highly standardized & templatized . Productization helps services to be delivered zero-touch and enables them to be transacted over a service exchange. But designing these services requires a completely different mindset and rhythm..

In the previous blog, we looked at Abstraction as a key lever in unleashing new potential in Service Delivery. Abstraction de-lineated service delivery and service creation and enabled newer ways of working.

As part of our ongoing blog series on the Digital Service Model, we now explore how a paradigm shift in the service delivery model impacts the future of Digital Enterprise.

Organizations will start to move the process-centric Delivery model to a Productized delivery model. Service delivery in organizations typically follows an ITIL-based rhythm. The current model has supported them well for Incident, Problem, or Change management types of requests. This has worked well so far in the last 2 decades when the organizations did not have any standards, to begin with. However, with the rising user expectations in the digital world and complex business models, the delivery model needs to shift.

Productization is one of the Core Tenets of the Digital Service Model.

The consumer world inspires this, packaging each service in the form of a product. Productization simplifies transacting, metering, and consuming services over an exchange. As an example, in the case of Uber, taxi-ride is a productized service. With Netflix, movie streaming is a packaged service. Providers can build, track, maintain, and bill customers at a productized service level. Additionally, for consumers, it enables flexibility and a better experience and provides a templatized way delivery can happen.

In an Enterprise, productization refers to packaging and designing services that standardize and templatize at the point of delivery while personalizing at the point of consumption. Productization enables services to transact over an exchange.

Any of the services below in an Enterprise can be published as a product

Organizations have a consistent way in which these services can be delivered. Packaging these as products helps in scaling up service delivery at the speed of request. Each product can be a service catalog to the end users

Here are some of the guidelines with Productization in an Enterprise.

• Each product comes with well well-defined service specification
• Each product has pre-defined inputs, outputs, dependencies, and constraints. Each product can exist on its own as a stand-alone component or can chain with other products like a ‘Lego block’ to provide more complex services.
• Each product has well-defined options and choices. At the point of consumption, this ensures that services can personalize.
• Designers create each product to address multiple service delivery methods—user-triggered, machine-triggered, etc., and deliver it across any UI channel.
• Each product comes preloaded with validations & error handling to ensure easy diagnostics.
• The design of each product includes mechanisms of traceability, making it easy to track from a compliance perspective.
• You can render each product as a ‘software-defined component’ for easy portability, versioning, and deployment across any channel.

Product Management in the Service Delivery World.

The new Digitization way of doing things will require Enterprises to radically shift from the conventional Service Management mindset to a Product Management mindset.

Enterprises will use Design thinking, Lean approach and Agile methodology to design and develop products.

We will design each product as a fully automated functional component with self-service capabilities.They can be provided as a service catalog on their own. They are also built with an open framework so that can serve any scenario across any user persona and can also be chained across with other service catalogs very easily (like Lego blocks)

It is also important to highlight that we do not expect the ITIL-based approach to go away any soon. Organizations will continue to leverage both the current service delivery model and digital service model in parallel for the next few years. However, the percentage of automated services delivered through a digital service delivery will continue to increase steadily and reach a peak in a 4–6 year period depending on organizational size and maturity.

Evolution of Product Manager role:

Furthermore, the organizations will start to have a product manager as a new role, that will own and manage the entire process from service design through deployment & life cycle management at an enterprise or a functional level.

We expect a global Enterprise with 3000–5000 employees to have any where between 100–150 service catalogs for their Digital workplace/ data center needs

The product manager will start to holistically look at these service needs, considering how to design, develop, and maintain them.

Difference between the Process-centric and Product-centric approaches.

In the diagram above we highlight how a Service Delivery manager focuses on executing IT automation in the current scenario. Organizations incur costs and employ resources with skills for a period of time before they start to see benefits when they actively run the entire process of automating a new need as a separate program. The decision-making for taking up any new automation is based on the cost-benefit analysis. Even after this approach, the benefits taper at some point.

User experience does not sit at the center of decision-making in the current process-centric approach.

Compare this with the new Product mindset required in Digital age. The Product manager evaluates and identifies all the product catalog opportunities for the organization. Services will be published as catalogs on a service exchange in the digital world by partners and providers. The Product manager merely has to specify the requirement and ensure the catalogs meet her/his demands. The focus is on identifying the right catalogs that fit their purpose and enhancing the value to the end-users. They are constantly engaged in capturing consumer experience metrics for the performance of any service catalog. The product manager performs usage/spend analysis, constantly evaluates the validity of the service catalog, and runs a tight service life cycle management. They can version control the services and retire services that are no longer used.

Organizations need to be open to the idea of product manager playing a critical role in the future of digital service delivery.

Apart from the benefits highlighted earlier, here are some additional benefits worth mentioning with the productized delivery model

Better Control with a Single Layer of Consumption:

Productization presents an opportunity for enterprises to consume services at a single layer across any system/tool or Platform. Product managers can control the entire usage/spending for services at this layer. Also provides a single view from a compliance reporting perspective.

Measure Consumer Experience at a Service Catalog Level:

Productization helps in tracking value offered at a service catalog level. Today, we perform customer satisfaction after the fact and cannot track it at a service level. With the productized approach, you can find how the user onboarding experience was for a new employee who just joined.

In summary, we have seen how productized services can change the way enterprises can transform their service delivery maturity. Have you started your productization journey in your Enterprises? Are you seeing the benefits? Chime in with your thoughts.

In our next blog, we will look at how the Business model paradigm shift will impact Digital Service Delivery in Enterprises.

Tags #Product manager  #Service delivery world  #Service is a product  #zero-touch  

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