# ITIL/Foundation/Service Management/Stakeholders

This lesson introduces the main definitions used to define the service stakeholders involved in Information Technology Infrastructure Library 2011.

## Objectives and Skills

Objectives and skills for this service stakeholders section of ITIL Foundation include:
* Define and explain the concept of stakeholders in service management
* Define and explain the concept of provider in service management
* Describe differences between the various service provider types.
* Define and explain the concept of internal and external customers
* Define and explain the concept of user in service management

## Activities

* Review the key terms, then the questions below.
* Use the Discuss page to post comments and questions regarding this lesson.

## Key Terms

Stakeholders are all people, organization or others who are involved in the business process as customer, provider …

### Service providers

A service provider is a group that provides organizations with consulting, legal, real estate, education, communications, storage, processing, and many other services.
Any IT service could be considered as a service provider delivering an outcome to a customer
IT professionals differentiate between service providers by categorizing them as type I, II, or III. The three service types are recognized by the IT industry although specifically defined by ITIL and the US Telecommunications Act of 1996.

#### Type I service provider

As they are funded by business unit overheads, the type I providers avoid costs and risks generally faced when dealing with external customers. By the way, they are supposed to have a good understanding of the business requirement that fund them.

#### Type II service provider

Shared services refers to the provision of a service by one part of an organization or group where that service is also used in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider.
Typical shared service units are human resources, finance, IT and other services in a company that are shared between several business units.

#### Type III service provider

External providers are often used to not have to support assets needed to provide a service. They are anyway more focused on costs and risks they have to take care on behalf of the customers and are more difficult to have a good understanding of the business requirement than internal providers.

### Customer

Here also and as already stated previously, a distinction is made between customers who share the same organization than providers and others.

#### Internal customers

The internal customer is someone or a group of people who will get the core service and who are in the same company or organization than the provider.

#### External customer

An external customer is actually paying money to receive the service and therefore generates direct revenue.

### User

Users are actually those who will actually use the service. Very often in a company, the customer will be the purchasing department that will buy the service to the provider, but it will be another department who will use it.

### Supplier

While providers will deliver the core service, the supplier will deal with the supporting services, infrastructure and others.