IS&T Service Portfolio Data Dictionary (Glossary of Terms)

business owner

Person

Responsible for communicating functionality a service or product needs to provide in order to meet needs of the customer. Makes non-operational decisions on upgrades, business requirements.  Person that sponsors a service.

We may want to consider whether some services have more than one business owner: for example, wikis could be split into admin wikis vs academic wikis, each having a different business owner.

Is sponsor a better term?  Do we need language that is more flexible as business owner has a very specific connotation?

service owner

Person

Responsible for the support, maintenance and enhancement of a solution as outlined by the business need (see Business Owner).  In refining the Problem Response process, service owner has been defined as an individual member of IS&T senior staff.

coordinator

Team

IS&T team who has responsibility and decisions on operations and upgrades, outage response, triage and mitigation, unless they impact business requirements. IS&T staff primarily responsible for a product, service or component of a service offering.  The coordinator ensures intended use of the product, service offering or component is aligned with the business goals from the customer.
 
In addition, the coordinator acts as defacto project manager for releases, and is responsible for the following:

• ensuring that everyone who needs to know has a full understanding of the product, the product-line architecture, etc.
• ensuring there are adequate resources to staff the release team
• ensuring that everyone in the acquisition, licensing, packaging, deployment and support processed have everything they need in place and are ready to go
• ensuring that a business plan exists that defines funding of the project is in place
• determining the proper timing for the launch

financial owner

Person

Responsible for funding of a product or service.

product

Computer program or application. Can be stand alone or interact with various other products and services. An example of a product would be Outlook 2007.

service family (category)

A set of related functions, in support of one or more business areas, which is made up of software, hardware, people and processes.  A category may be comprised of many Services, which in turn contain one or more solutions, spread across a number of hardware and software platforms.  An example of a category would be Communications.

system

A number of related things that work together to achieve an overall objective. A computer system including hardware, software and applications. A database management system or operating system includes many software modules that are designed to perform a set of related functions.

service offering (solution)

A method of solving a business problem with information technology (implementation).  There may be several solution choices for any given Service.  An example of a solution would be Exchange or IMAP.

license file

License files list specific information, such as the server name or quantity of licenses.

license terms

Terms and conditions under which a product can be used, as negotiated with the vendor and referenced by the purchase order used to acquire the product.

license key

Alphanumeric string, code or other activation mechanism by which a software product can be unlocked for installation and use. A license key can indicate proof of license.

license type

Describes the way customers access and use a product.  Examples would be stand alone, concurrent, site.

issue

Change in the state of a service.  Is this interchangeable with "incident" or "event"? Or something different?

service components

Various building blocks of a service, including software products, web services, hardware platform and operating system.

Service

A coherent, ready-to-use deliverable that is of value to the customer. Services allow customers to do business without worrying about underlying technology of IT infrastructure.  An example of a Service would be Email.

customer

Someone who buys products or Services. The customer of a Service is the person or group who defines and agrees the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

platform

Hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software and operating system required for a product or service to run. Mobile, Windows, Mac and linux are examples of platforms.

escalation

Process by which a staff member or team consults with or defers to another team in order to take action or make decisions that are beyond the competencies assigned to the original team or staff.

escalation level

Indicates the resources needed to address an issue with a service.

release

The means by which IS&T introduces new products and services into the MIT community.

ReleaseCore

Team

ReleaseCore is established to provide governance, direction and resources for product and service release and service portfolio maintenance efforts in IS&T.  This group will serve as the stewards of IS&T Library of Procedures, and promote and support the effective use of those practices across the organization. Release Core has the responsibility to ensure that IS&T portfolio processes are repeatable, helpful, easy to use, and improved over time. This cross functional team serves as an aggregator of requests, gathers input on potential portfolio additions and retirement candidates, and generates transparency throughout the organization.

requestor

Person

The individual making the request.

request

A formal proposal for a product or service, which is documented electronically in an RT queue.

supplier management

Team

The process responsible for ensuring that all contracts with suppliers support the needs of the customer, and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments.  This function is currently carried out by IS&T Procurement.

request fulfillment

Team

The team (and process) responsible for managing the life cycle of all product requests.

IS&T Finance

Team

Part of IS&T Administration, made up of Financial Business Consultants (FBCs) and Financial Assistants (FAs).  IS&T Finance executes requisitions, serves as liaison with MIT Central procurement in conjunction with supplier management, and provides cost models and financial analysis for products and service offerings.

end user

Person

The person who actually uses a particular product.

incident

An unplanned interruption to a Service or a reduction in the quality of a Service. Failure of a configuration item that has not yet impacted a Service is also an Incident. For example: failure of one disk from a mirror set.

provisioning

The process by which a customer obtains a service or product.