Business services are a subset of economic services and provide value to customers by enabling them to achieve their business objectives. These services are different from goods and deliver value in the form of benefits rather than tangible items. They can be delivered by a variety of businesses including information technology (IT), consulting, marketing and financial services.
In addition to the services that support a company’s core business, business services also include service management and IT infrastructure monitoring. Service management enables IT to monitor the performance and availability of services and provides visibility for non-technical stakeholders. This enables them to understand how an incident affects the business and what they need to do about it.
IT infrastructure monitoring is a key business service and is typically provided by a vendor or managed by the IT department. Business services can be monitored via a dashboard, a service catalog/CMDB or via an ITSM tool. Using business services in a monitoring tool helps to ensure that incidents can be traced back to the application or device that is providing the service.
The New York State Office of General Services established the Business Service Center to increase efficiencies and lower costs by centralizing transactional Human Resources (HR) and Finance services common across agencies. This allows agencies to focus on their mission critical activities. The following table shows current (active) employment and projected employment for the professional and business services industry sector.