Fast-Track Your Enterprise Service Design

Use Info-Tech’s three-layer approach to design a sustainable enterprise service customers want to use, employees want to support, and the organization wants to finance.

Analyst perspective

IT has what it takes to become an enterprise service orchestrator.

Exceptional enterprise services are not merely built; they are orchestrated. True service design recognizes, aligns, and unifies the complex interplay of systems, people, and processes to craft a single, seamless flow of value to the customer. This holistic view not only creates a superior customer and employee experience, but also reveals opportunities for reuse, driving down costs and reducing technical debt.

Too often, however, services are not designed but merely digitized – analog processes are forced into a digital wrapper without reevaluating critical touchpoints, handoffs, and experiences. This creates a ripple effect of dysfunction: employees invent inefficient workarounds, internal expediency trumps customer needs, and the experience for both customers and employees becomes fragmented and frustrating.

This is where IT must evolve from a technology provider to an enterprise service orchestrator.

And IT may not realize it yet, but they have what it takes! More than any other function, IT has a unique, cross-functional view of how information flows through the organization. They understand the systems, the data, and the teams who rely on them. This positions IT as the natural conductor to collaborate with business peers and design services that are coherent, efficient, and customer-centered. An IT-led design breaks down silos, reduces waste, and replaces the "us vs. them" mentality with a shared mission.

But to lead this transformation, IT must shift from a "technology-first" to a "service-first" mindset. By leveraging proven frameworks like Info-Tech’s three-layer approach, IT can architect the cohesive services that define a modern organization. IT is so much more than the technology it supports – it is the engine of great service design.

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Organizations often digitize but fail to design services. In other words, they translate existing analog processes, tools, and exchanges into digital ones but fail to:

• Incorporate key integrations.
• Apply existing skills, processes, and tools.
• Involve the right people in the design process from the start.

Too often, what has the potential to become a great service results in a fragmented customer and employee experience, increased technical debt, and scrambling to meet unrealistic expectations.

Common Obstacles

This happens because services are designed without:

• Visibility into all the people, processes, and technology that make up a service.
• Involvement of the customer, the business, and IT together to understand the whole service ecosystem.
• IT’s expertise as a specialized business contributor that provides crucial insights that shape the service.

Enterprise services cannot be great at enabling a customer to reach their goals or solve their problems if they continue to bump up against these obstacles.

Info-Tech’s Approach

The solution to these challenges is to design not digitize:

• Leverage Info-Tech’s Three-Layer Service Design framework to build resilient, efficient enterprise services that include customer, stakeholder, IT, and operational elements from the start.
• Foster collaboration and break down silos across the organization with a focus on enabling the customer.
• Ensure customer-centricity and early IT involvement at each stage of the design.

Info-Tech Insight

Great design is not a fragmented one-off; it integrates people, systems, and data to provide a coherent, resilient, and sustainable customer and employee experience.

IT leaders are uniquely positioned to lead the organization in enterprise service design

• IT’s ability to see the connections across the organization: integrations across systems, and the flow of information (including financial) through those systems makes IT uniquely qualified as a service design leader. It is also IT’s experience understanding and executing on business needs (not technology) that provides IT with insight into the wider enterprise service context.
• To do so, IT leaders need to change the way they view services (and themselves) in order to successfully lead great service design. They need to think bigger. Services are not just about IT solutions – they are about how the organization enables the customer to reach their goals. IT cannot wait until business decisions are made before they get involved.
• Once IT reorients themselves around this way of thinking, they can promote a better service design approach – one that moves closer to the customer and unites internal teams to orient their goals, activities, and roles around enabling the customer.

The bottom line: IT must play to its strengths, but not the obvious ones. IT’s specialized understanding of the organization and its connections and integrations provides a unique opportunity to lead enterprise service design and build services that customers want to use, the business wants to support, and the organization wants to finance.

88%

of CIOs say their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused.

Source: Foundry, 2025

Great enterprise design can only be accomplished if organizations overcome the following obstacles:

• Seeing IT as only technology providers and supports. IT has unique abilities crucial to good service design: they see integrations and they understand information flow better than anyone in the organization.
• Designing services around business needs or issues and forgetting that the service does not exist without the customer. Business activities enable customers to use your service to reach their goals.
• Not understanding what problem the service solves or the service’s wider context and therefore not being able to determine if you have the resources to design, operate, and improve it.
• Shying away from the service owner role: without a single point of accountability, you risk building a service everyone or no one owns. Either way, your service quickly becomes a “Frankenstein monster” as you struggle to address various organizational asks.

Organizations forget their customers and fail to meet objectives too often

45%

Almost half of federal governments surveyed fail to assess if their services address user needs throughout the service design and delivery cycle

Source: OECD, 2024

70%

70% of digital transformations fail to achieve their stated objectives.

Source Forth, Ringel, Michael, et al

Exceptional service requires designing beyond the digital surface

INFO-TECH’S SERVICE MATURITY CONTINUUM

LEVEL 1: ANALOG

• Traditional methods used to deliver the service. Manual processes, paper-based forms, in-person transactions.

LEVEL 2: DIGITIZED

• Interactions and inputs transitioned to digital channels with minimal changes to the underlying processes or staff involvement.

LEVEL 3: DIGITALIZED

• Workflows and business processes reimagined with a focus on user-friendliness and efficiency. Integrations established between disparate systems needed in the end-to-end process.

LEVEL 4: AUTONOMIZED

• Select interactions and decisions automated in the end-to-end process. Service adaptation possible based on user behavior and/or preferences. Analytical Capabilities shift from purely historical to forecast.

LEVEL 5: INTEROPERABLE

• Are dynamically personalized and can interact with external systems or data sources without manual intervention. Enables highly complex end-to-end process execution enterprise-wide.

Digitization is not enough to get value – and is the reason many transformations fail

Many organizations today have made progress by digitizing services, but digitization often results in underlying inefficiencies, siloed data and workflows, and poor user experiences. On the surface services may appear modernized, but they actually fail to deliver sustained value.

Don’t just digitize, design at three levels for high-maturity services

The future of services is autonomized and interoperable. Achieving this requires deliberate service design at three interconnected layers:

• Customer: Ensuring services solve the customer’s real problems in a usable way.
• Business: Designed for enterprise-wide scalability though aligned goals, roles, and processes.
• Operational: Built for sustainable systems through the right data, technology, and skills.

This is a key reason why CIOs, CDOs, and even emerging roles like the Chief Digital Services Officer are being tasked with the mandate of enterprise service design.

Info-Tech’s approach

Use Info-Tech’s three-layer approach to design a sustainable enterprise service

The Info-Tech difference:

Deliver strategically aligned services designed for resilience and efficiency.

1. Save time and money: spend minimal upfront time analyzing and scoping to know which services are worthwhile investing in.
2. Deliver maximum value: get to know your customer then align business activities around enabling them.
3. Fortify and optimize: identify and incorporate organization-wide service integrations and reuse opportunities.
4. Connect: Dissolve organizational silos and collaborate as one team where IT contributes their specialized knowledge.

Info-Tech’s methodology for fast-tracking your enterprise service design

Insight Summary

Use Info-Tech’s three-layer approach to design a service that your customer wants to use, your employees want to support, and your organization wants to finance.

Overarching insight

Don’t just digitize, design! Great design is not a fragmented one-off; it integrates people, systems, and data to provide a coherent, resilient, and sustainable customer and employee experience.

Phase 1

Define your service’s context and scope: Spend just enough time upfront to avoid investing in the wrong services. Understand the problem your service solves, the resources it requires, and the stakeholders it needs to build, operate, maintain, and improve it before you invest in its design.

Phase 2

Get as close to your customer as possible: Without the customer, your service has no purpose. Design your service around real customer needs and experiences.

Phase 3

Ensure no customer action happens in a vacuum: Orchestrate every business goal, action, and technological choice in concert with the customer’s journey, but align your design to stakeholder value to guarantee organizational resilience and long-term sustainability.

Phase 4

Identify and align key skills, technology, and processes that enable the business to support your customer and enable your customer to use your service. Good service design centers around human goals and activities, but services cannot operate without the hidden systems underpinning them.

Phase 5

Describe your service’s clear value, timelines, and risks to secure approval and support. It is not enough to design a service and extract profound insights from it if you cannot secure approval and funds to implement it.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Service Context Map

Quickly understand your service’s context and viability so you know if the timing is right, if you have the resources to proceed, and if you have the right people in the room to design it.

Service Proposal Document

Communicate your service’s purpose and value for approval and funding.

Key deliverable:

Integrated Customer Journey Blueprint

A tool that aligns your service’s customer, business, and operational layers to provide key insights into your service’s size, scope, and requirements for next steps.

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits

• Provides IT with the opportunity to demonstrate the value they bring to the customer and the business.
• No more last-minute scrambling: Brings IT to the “front of the house” with the customer to build in crucial IT technical, security, and resource components early, reducing technical debt, and lowering resource costs.
• Fosters better collaboration and teamwork that counters the “us vs. them” reaction.

Business Benefits

• Requires minimal time to reveal just enough detail to test service viability and extract key insights to understand next steps and secure approval and funding.
• Uncovers key integrations to avoid later bottlenecks, dissatisfaction, and costly workarounds.
• Aligns and focuses internal activities on enabling customer goals thus reducing organizational barriers that fragment the customer experience and dishearten employees.

Measure the value of this blueprint

Case study

INDUSTRY

Utilities

SOURCE

Anonymous

Do you recognize yourself in this story?

Challenge

The organization launched a new renewable energy permit service but excluded IT from the initial design, viewing them solely as a technology provider measured on budget, not business outcomes. IT was engaged only when deadlines were imminent, leaving no time for strategic design.

Complication

This forced IT into an impossible choice:

1. Deliver a sub-optimal service on time, damaging its reputation.
2. Overwork its team to deliver a functional solution, absorbing all the technical debt and employee burnout without credit.

Results

Outcome: The organization chose the second path. Although the initiative was successful and customer needs met, the result was a fragile, "digitized-not-designed" service that was impossible to reuse, creating significant technical debt and throw-away work. The rushed process led to resentment and overwork for employees and most likely a less optimal experience for customers.

Strategic Solution: This waste is preventable. When IT is empowered to lead service design from the outset, their cross-functional knowledge of systems and information flow becomes a strategic asset. An IT-led, collaborative approach replaces last-minute emergencies with the intentional creation of coherent, sustainable, and resilient enterprise services.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked-off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Executive & Technical Counseling

"Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we'll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Glossary of terms

Customer

Someone who uses your services.

• Business Customer
  • Internal organization customers: HR, Finance, Marketing, Legal, etc.
• Enterprise Customer
  • External organization customers: students, shoppers, constituents, etc.

Service

• All the activities, apps, processes, data, resources, and technology assembled into coherent, ready-to-use packages and delivered to individuals or businesses to address a need or enable them to do something.
• Services deliver something of value to customers, often in real time and through many different customer touchpoints and interactions.
• In this way, the close connection between the organization and the customer forms the customer experience.

Enterprise, Business, and Digital Services

• Enterprise Services: Services the organization’s customers consume, e.g. student registration services.
• Business Services: Services the business (internal departments) consume, e.g. HR, Finance, or Legal.
• Digital Services: Services that use digital technologies, e.g. online taxes, online student registration, or online shopping. Digital services often bring IT closer to the enterprise customer.

Product

• The outcome of a production process that addresses customer needs and goals.
• The customer relationship is not as closely connected as it is with a service.

Value

• What a service provides to a customer.
• A customer does not care about the effort it takes you to deliver the services, only about the value of the service to them.
• Services are distinct from products mainly in how organizations and the customers create value together (often in real time) to form a customer experience.

A customer is someone who uses your services

• Organization

• Service

• Customer

• This blueprint uses the most basic definition of customer to mean anyone who uses your services. Some may find this word distasteful because it has long been associated with exchanging money and some industries do not involve a direct exchange of money for services.
• To deal with this, service providers often use synonyms like client, consumer, patron, user, partner, or replace customer with more industry-specific terms: patient, student, employee, prospect, donor, benefactor, constituent.
• Ultimately, the term you use does not matter, as it is more important to understand that you are creating a service to bring value to someone who uses it. You are welcome to replace customer with any term you feel comfortable with, so long as the definition remains unchanged.

A customer can be direct or indirect

It is essential to understand the needs and goals of all customers as sometimes they conflict, and you must determine how to prioritize needs and resolve these conflicts. In this higher education example, the service has a direct customer (the Registrar’s Office) and an indirect customer (students).

Phase 1

Define Your Service’s Context and Scope

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

Describing your service

Discovering your service’s wider context

Confirming your service’s viability

This phase involves the following participants:

CIO/CDO

Business SMEs

Customer representatives

IT experts with exposure to customer-facing services, e.g. BA/BSAs, Architects, PMs

Service owner

UX designers