Business services refer to activities that support the operations of a business without producing a tangible product. These include consulting, advertising, marketing, waste management, staffing, logistics and shipping services, and administrative support.
The growth of the industry has been fueled by new communication technologies that allow businesses to outsource their work. As a result, many new companies have been launched in the sector with the goal of creating and offering innovative services. During the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for these types of services has increased, especially for those that provide warehousing and distribution.
As the industry has evolved, more value-added services have been added to traditional shipping and warehousing offerings. These include a higher level of customer service, including providing inventory tracking information, order entering and fulfillment, and light assembly services. Many of these newer services are also integrated with transportation and logistical capabilities to provide a more complete end-to-end solution for businesses.
The ability to model business services is useful in several ways. It can be used to create a status dashboard to let non-technical stakeholders see when there is an incident affecting one of the business services they care about. It can also be used to create a service catalog or CMDB, or as part of an incident response process. For example, mapping technical services to business services can help identify which resources should be restored first when an incident impacts the production of a service. This is often referred to as dependency mapping.