To function and develop successfully in the long term, service providers must be able to think and act strategically.

Achieving strategic goals or objectives requires the use of strategic assets. The ITIL 4 Foundation PDF book Service Strategy shows how to turn service management into a strategic asset.

A strategy that ensures long-term functioning and success should give a clear understanding of:

• What services should be offered and to whom?
• How do you position yourself in a competitive environment, what kind of competition exists and is potentially possible in the market of your services; what are your objective advantages?
• How will customers make decisions about choosing a service provider?
• What benefit will the consumer have from this, what exactly are these services important to him?
• How the client(s) and other stakeholders will perceive and evaluate the value of services, and how this value will be created;
• How to identify strategic investment paths, how to create compelling business cases to attract investment?
• How can financial management gain transparency and control over the value creation process, how to achieve financial visibility and control over the cost of services?
• How to assess the quality of service (service), how to measure its performance?
• How to identify ways to improve the quality of services?
• How to optimally and efficiently allocate resources in the service portfolio?
• How to resolve conflicting requirements for shared resources?
• To answer such questions, knowledge from the IT field is necessary, but not sufficient. ITIL requires knowledge of such disciplines as operational management, marketing, finance, organizational development, system dynamics, organization of (industrial) production (in my opinion, this is unrealistic in Russia ?).

According to the current definition, a service (or service) is a set of activities that bring value to the client, contributing to the result that the client wants to achieve, without being responsible for specific costs and risks.

A service delivery strategy should be based on a simple but fundamental axiom: “customers do not buy products from a service (service) provider, they buy the satisfaction of their very specific needs.” Therefore, to be successful, a service provider must "deliver" the results the client wants to achieve (not the off-the-shelf programs and systems that the provider has in its arsenal).
 

Basic concepts

Determining the benefits of the service and guaranteeing their provision

• Service value
• Service Provider
• Service delivery model
• Service Model

There are 3 types of service providers:

1. Type I – exists within an organization solely to deliver services to one specific business unit
2. Type II – Serves multiple departments within the same organization
3. Type III – functions as an external service provider serving various external clients.

Service Provisioning Models is a classification and analysis of different models that can be chosen by customers and used by service providers to create and deliver services:

• Managed Service – when the organizational unit requiring the service fully finances the provision of this service to itself
• Shared Service – provision of various services to one or more organizational units based on a common infrastructure and resources
• Utility – Services are provided on a per-customer basis, how often, and at what time.

There are several common service delivery strategies.

Insourcing – Using an internal service provider to manage IT services. The organization uses internal resources to design, develop, implement, manage, operate and/or support new, changed or revised services.

Outsourcing, etc

Outsourcing – Using an External Service Provider to manage IT services. The organization uses the resources of an external organization (or organizations) to carry out part of the activities associated with the design, development, management, operation or support of services.

Co-sourcing – A combination of insourcing and outsourcing. A number of external organizations are used to provide some individual elements within the life cycle of services. Employees of the customer organization and the third party work together to design, develop, implement, manage, operate and/or support new, changed or revised services. For example, part of the software development may be outsourced, while the main code will be owned by the customer.

Partnership or multisourcing – The approach involves a formal agreement between two or more organizations to work together to design, develop, implement, manage, operate and (or) support services.