IT services vs digital services: is there any difference?

ITIL® 4 defines IT service as “a service based on the use of information technology”. In my opinion, this definition needs improvement. And I’d like to discuss why and how it could be improved.

Let’s consider a taxi service as an easy example. Many companies, such as Uber or Gett, depend heavily on information technology to provide this service. IT is utilized to record all information about clients, their trips, preferences, and payment methods. IT provides an interface for placing orders, tracking car coordinates, and making payments. IT helps in dealing with taxi drivers – their registration, order assignment, and remuneration. Is it enough to consider taxi an IT service? Well, according to the ITIL® definition, yes – taxi happens to be an IT service.

Furthermore, as information technology becomes more and more adopted (which occurs everywhere – in logistics, in agriculture, in the construction industry, and so on), more and more services turn into IT services. This means that someone might just skip the "IT" prefix since any service might or might not be an IT service depending on the way it’s being delivered right now. However, I doubt this would help IT departments to build their service catalogues because this approach brings a new level of ambiguity to their understanding of the IT service management scope.

So, what we do in Cleverics when we deal with our customers, we define an IT service as "a means of enabling the use of information technology to improve the effectiveness of, and to remove constraints from, information processes". According to this definition, the focus of IT services is to leverage information technology to empower business operations and to reveal new business opportunities. That is to say for IT services information technology is not an enabler, rather it’s what is being delivered.

OK, then what about services based on IT, such as taxi services, banking, online training, and many, many more? Marketers insist these are digital services, while service providers that rely heavily on information technology are digital organizations. And it's quite logical that the process of organizational transformation towards widespread and innovative use of information technology for customers' benefit is considered a digital transformation.

By using this approach to define IT and digital services, all the pieces can be gathered into one holistic picture. This is what we usually expect from comprehensive frameworks like ITIL®. So surprisingly, it was marketers who came up with a solution, adding a "digital" sticker to whatever originally related just to IT :)