What are Service Offerings and Agreements? (SOA)

If you're just discovering ITIL, you might have come across an interesting area of it called 'Service Offerings and Agreements', or SOA for short (not to be confused with 'service-oriented architecture'). It's actually a very interesting facet of the ITIL sphere and covers quite a lot of territory, like the following areas of management:

• Service Catalog
• Service Level
• Financial
• Demand
• Supplier
• Relationships
• Strategy
• Service Portfolio

Clearly, this covers a lot of ground when it comes to setting up certain agreements or managing specific types of services within an organization. This of course highlights an obvious point - businesses need people who understand how to set up and manage these things. This is of course where you come in; assuming of course that you have the right training and certification to pull it off.

Simply put, service offerings and agreements are broad guidelines which seek to cover a wide range of business-related concerns, many of which are interrelated. In other words, you could think of a large business as being nothing more than a series of independent processes which affect each other in different ways. While the management team is trying to keep each separate section moving in a positive direction, we also have the issue of how these parts are either making things easier (overall) or more difficult. At the same time, one might even say that there is a certain amount of risk involved with too many 'unknowns', and SOA helps us to undermine these threats.

Service Catalog

For example, having an easy-to-understand service catalog that is updated frequently is very important. Without this key piece it is pretty much impossible for a business (or their customers) to identify what services they are offering, etc... Right behind that you have the service level, or SLA (service level agreements). This is vital because it outlines the 'rules', if you will, which govern the services themselves. Having these in place lets everyone know what's fair, legal as well as who's responsible for what.

Financial Management

Next, we have financial management. It's obvious what the point is here - to help price and assign value to services. Likewise, financial management can allow businesses to make more prudent decisions regarding their investments, and so on and so forth. Demand management is also vital; through it, we are able to determine what the actual demand is for certain products / services as well as figure out who is looking for them (very important if you want to build a real consumer base over a longer period of time).

Supplier Management

Further on we have supplier management. Needless to say, every business is at least partly dependent on some other group for something - you might call these people 'suppliers'. Keeping track of what they're doing (if they're meeting expectations and so forth) allows an organization to really stay on track with their duties. Similarly, we have relationship management; which seeks to outline the real needs of customers. Clearly, this is a really important area as well, and once you have a clear picture of what they want, you can begin adapting the other areas to suit their needs.

Strategy Management

This of course brings us to strategy management, arguably the most important area of all. What this area of concentration allows businesses to do is combine everything (all the other areas) into one grouping so that a better plan can be formulated. Think about it, without strategy, what do you really have? Even if you have a bunch of really great assets, you still need strategies for using them, don't you?

Service Portfolio Management

Finally we have service portfolio management. The purpose of this section is to completely identify all aspects of the IT lifecycle so that everyone has a really clear picture of what's being done and accomplished. For instance, this would entail everything from the very origins of a concept through to the very end when the service is no longer being used. In turn, this might allow people to look back on certain services in hindsight and glean new information with regards to what worked and what didn't so that they can build better services in the future.

So, what does this have to do with you and your career, you ask? In case you haven't realized, everything covered in SOA is really important to how organizations conduct their daily business. In other words, if you possess the knowledge, they're going to jump at the opportunity to hire you so that you can transform their business into something better. This is especially true of organizations which have more extensive IT resources and/or are more reliant on them in general. What's our recommendation? Get certified and get out there and grab yourself a great career opportunity.