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In the era of digital transformation, businesses are reimagining their operations to meet the demands of a technology-driven economy. Today’s entrepreneurs are not only adapting existing processes, but also pioneering fully digital ventures that operate on an integrated technology framework. This change requires a structured approach to designing, implementing and managing digital services effectively, ensuring each seamless delivery and regulatory compliance.
ISO 20000-1 provides entrepreneurs with a solid framework for building and managing IT service systems, making it an invaluable tool for entering the digital business landscape.
Digital transformation involves refactoring business processes to be initiated by predetermined environmental aspects, retrieving the required data from the environment, creating the expected service in the form of knowledge, and adding its instances to the service repository at each initiation. While digitalization focuses on transforming existing processes, a growing trend places emphasis on building digital businesses from scratch by structuring binary processes.
In this text, I explain how entrepreneurs can start a digital business by implementing the ISO 20000-1 standard, an IT service management framework that results in a service management system.
What is digital business?
Digital business is essentially a binary representation of a business service – a set of processes implemented and integrated using information technology. ISO 20000-1 provides a framework for managing the lifecycle of a digital enterprise, from planning to amortization, supporting only one mode of delivery: digital.
Service planning: the foundation of digital business
When you plan services, you design a business dedicated to providing digital services. Unlike traditional enterprises that rely on physical components equivalent to offices and human resources, digital enterprises are created by the integration of digital components equivalent to software, hardware and information.
Your digital service can take many forms, equivalent to an online shopping platform, a mobile app, or a more advanced service, equivalent to an automatic health monitoring system built into a connected vehicle. The process begins by creating a service profile that identifies the problem that needs to be solved, specifies the required components, and determines how they will probably be integrated to deliver the solution.
Role of the entrepreneur: Integrator
As an entrepreneur in the digital age, your major role is that of an integrator. Most of the required components for your service exist already in the information market. Your task is:
1. Buy technology properly: Analyze and compare available technologies, assign them to your requirements and make a list of suppliers.
2. Ensure Compatibility: Select technologies that are compatible each with the service requirements and with each other.
3. Optimize integration: Stack compatible technologies for optimal performance, ensuring customer satisfaction through service reliability and efficiency.
Financial management in digital business
Budgeting and accounting in a digital business focus primarily on operating expenses (OPEX) moderately than capital expenses (CAPEX). As an entrepreneur, you must manage supply and demand in a timely manner and adjust your production capability accordingly. OPEX, the backbone of your organization’s financial management, relies on several types of licenses, which are often usage-based. For example, cloud infrastructures are widely used to provide digital services. To optimize costs, you need to estimate your enterprise traffic and manage bandwidth accordingly.
Regulatory compliance: a key element
It is essential to create a regulatory profile. This structured file accommodates the legal requirements for your digital service, ensuring compliance and customization. APIs provided by regulators can simplify this process by offering real-time updates. Otherwise, manual updates are needed.
You must determine an acceptable level of service based on a benchmark appropriate to your market and industry. By maintaining this level of service, you meet the demands of the most vital stakeholder in your digital business: your customers. Service level instructions ought to be added as an ancillary element to the digital service. The service must confirm each transaction according to these instructions, record any discrepancies and flag them for further investigation and resolution.
Service catalog and asset management
Maintaining a service catalog is crucial. This catalog acts as a register of all digital services provided by your organization, describing their purpose and scope.
Any process that supports one or more digital services is an intangible asset. Innovative business processes also have the potential to obtain a patent. Additionally, the consistently changing information that allows business processes is considered an intangible asset. Another use of a service catalog is to function a registry of those intangible assets, including the processes that make up your digital services and the information that enable them.
Configuration database and service provisioning
A configuration database ought to be maintained, which acts as a repository of the digital processes that make up the digital service. This database allows you to view the current configuration of each service process, including how the process performs its assigned task, the triggers that initiate it, the input and output data streams, and the expected results.
The configuration database enables you, as an entrepreneur, to make more informed decisions about service provision by providing up-to-date information about the processes that make up your digital service. This helps ensure service availability, continuity and information security.
Continuous improvement and change management
The principle of continuous improvement requires changes in process configurations. When implementing changes, you must test the updated process against previously established criteria and integrate the new edition with the appropriate service before it goes live. The new edition of the process along with the updated configuration should then be added to the configuration database, retaining the previous versions for reference and backup purposes.
Building a successful digital business requires a combination of strategic planning, technology integration and continuous improvement. Entrepreneurs must act as integrators, leveraging existing technologies to create efficient and compliant digital services. By adopting the ISO 20000-1 standard, they gain a systematic approach to managing the lifecycle of digital services, from conceptualization to delivery. This framework not only ensures operational excellence, but also underpins innovation, enabling digital businesses to thrive in a competitive marketplace.