Business services are the intangible activities that enable a company to deliver value to customers without owning the underlying costs and risks. They include everything from technical services such as a cloud infrastructure platform or telecommunications to management services such as facility management and even professional services such as legal advice. These services help companies to operate efficiently and remain competitive by freeing up resources that could be better spent on other activities.

While business services are a subset of economic services, they share many of the same characteristics. Like economic services, they do not produce a tangible product and are generally performed by specialists or experts rather than in-house employees. They are also often scalable, allowing businesses to adjust their level of service depending on the need at any given time.

In addition, business services are often delivered on a contractual basis, making them flexible and affordable to use. This makes it easy for a business to outsource its non-core activities to specialized service providers, and this flexibility is important as the economy continues to shift toward a service-based economy.

The Business services category includes a wide variety of services that are needed by business enterprises to operate and stay competitive, including banking, transportation, warehousing, insurance, communication and more. In order to provide business services, companies must have certain capabilities such as financial management, accounting, IT services, facility management services and more.

Defining and designing business services requires the use of some powerful techniques to translate customer needs into simple measurable requirements, particularly those that can be used to inform a Service Design methodology. This approach focuses first on understanding who the Customer represents, what outcomes they need to achieve and then balancing these against the resources (including assets) that are required to deliver the service.

While business services may not be directly customer-facing, they are critical to ensuring that all other customer-facing services are operational. A successful Service Design process will typically result in higher quality products and outcomes both internally for your organisation and externally for your customers.

In SL1, the ability to create and manage business services is available for all Account Owner and Admin base roles. Click the business service you wish to add or edit and then follow the on-screen instructions. You can select which of your business services should display as favorites by clicking the star icon next to each service. This will ensure that the service is displayed at the top of your business services list. You can also map your business services to the supporting technical services that are a part of them. This will allow you to notify non-technical stakeholders when there is an incident impacting a business service they care about. You can find this feature on your Business Services page, within a Service Catalog/CMDB or in the form of health metrics on a status dashboard. To view or edit the list of supported business services, navigate to Services > Business Services.