ITIL: Service Design

Service Design is one of the five new ITIL® Service Lifecycle books published on 30th May 2007.

Service Design is the design of appropriate and innovative IT services, including their architectures, processes, policies, and documentation, to meet current and future agreed business requirements.

The Service Design stage of the lifecycle starts with a set of new or changed business requirements and ends with the development of a solution designed to meet the documented needs of the business. This developed solution, together with its Service Transition Pack, is then passed to Service Transition to build, test and deploy the new or changed service and on completion of these activities control is transferred to the Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement stages of the service lifecycle.

The main goals and objectives for Service Design include:

• The design of services that satisfy the business objectives and are aligned to business needs.
• The design of services that can be easily developed, maintained and enhanced whilst adhering to relevant time and cost constraints.
• The identification of all relevant risks and the taking of appropriate actions to either remove or mitigate those risks.
• The design of secure and resilient IT components, including infrastructure, environmental, applications and data.
• A contribution to the improvement of the overall quality if IT services.

Service Design contains discussions on the roles, responsibilities and activities involved within the Service Design stage and also considers the impact of processes on the service designs produced. Service Design also describes the major processes involved within these design activities, including:

• Service Catalogue Management
• Service Level Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• IT Service Continuity Management
• Information Security Management
• Supplier Management.

The Service Lifecycle