Involving all necessary stakeholders.

Documenting business drivers and requirements that can be translated into appropriate service definitions.

Taking a holistic view of the entire service environment and service lifecycle, including:

Service setup, which includes definition and design.

Service request.

Service provisioning.

Service consumption.

Service management and operations.

Service transition and termination.

A conscious awareness of what consumers of the service and the provider of the service experience at each stage of the service lifecycle must be taken into account to create the necessary service definition elements for the consumer-facing service-level agreement (SLA) and internal-facing operational-level agreement (OLA) criteria.

Defining the service scenarios and use cases.

Representing the service to understand its components, interactions, and sequences of interrelated actions.

Defining the users and roles involved with or interacting with the services so that the services created are user-centric.

Defining the service contract (SLA) for the services and service components in the following areas:

Infrastructure services.

Application/vApp services.

Platform services.

Software services.

Business services.

Defining service quality for:

Performance.

Availability.

Continuity.

Scalability.

Manageability.

Security.

Compliance.

Cost and pricing.

Defining the business service catalog and supporting IT service catalog.