Recently I was giving a class on ISO/IEC 20000 for a group of internal quality auditors.
Half -way into explaining the Service management, ITSM- its need, benefits etc etc, a student raised the hand and said: “Can you give a simple definition of ‘Service’?”
My first reaction was to go back to the slide which had the definition of Service (from my ITIL training mind-set). And I realized there, my slides didn’t have that – and a little later, that ISO/IEC 20000 conveniently omitted a definition of the important word – ‘Service’.
(And what is the definition of ‘Service provider’ as per the standard? ‘the organization aiming to achieve ISO/IEC 20000′! Uh oh.. so if I am not looking at ISO/IEC 20000, are you saying I am not a Service provider?? 
I do understand the context of that definition within the standard itself – but a better definition with a clarification of the context within the standard would have been more useful.)
Frankly, I like the latest definition of Service from ITIL V3: ““A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific cost and risks.”
After all these years, finally ITIL has given a more than decent definition for service – and I am sure a great deal of experience, analysis and effort has gone into such a definition.
Agreed, the sentence is not that simple – but a careful inspection of the statement gives you a real meaning and image of what is a services.
More importantly, it help differentiating ‘Service’ from ‘product’ through the phrase : ‘without the ownership of specific cost and risks’
I also like the phrase ‘facilitating outcomes customer want to achieve’ – which underlines the fact that the value is delivered to customer only when the service helps (or facilitates) his achievement of desired outcomes.
The whole definition gives a feel of ’customer being in the center point or the driving factor for the service’ - bingo!
Compare this with the definition in ITIL V2 which had multiple statements like : ” One or more IT systems which enable a business process. “ “Deliverables of IT Service provider as perceived by the customer” ” The service doesn’t merely consisting of just making computer resources available to customer“ Hmm – fair, but not quite clear. This definition had clear overlap to products (if you miss the last statement) .
