Predecessors/Before You Begin

Utility and warranty are two Service Strategy concepts. It's important to understand the concept of a service to understand utility and warranty.

Utility and Warranty

Utility is whether a service is "fit for purpose"--that is, whether the service does something useful.

Warranty is whether a service is "fit for use"--that is, whether the service has an adequate quality.

In ITIL v3, warranty is broken down into four questions:

• Is it available enough?
• Does it have adequate capacity?
• Is it "continuous" enough? (i.e. does the service meet its service continuity requirements)
• Is it secure enough?

These concepts can be applied to an organization, too. An organization that does "a little bit of everything" may have a high utility and low warranty. A decentralized IT department responsible for only one small part of overall IT, on the other hand, may have a very high warranty (for its few services) and low utility.

University-specific risks

Someone has to run IT. Often University IT shops will be pushed to have higher and higher utility--that is, to support more and more services--without being able to sacrifice warranty.

It can be difficult for Universities to make strategic decisions about utility and warranty, especially when the University expects IT to "do everything." Ideally, Service Level Agreements govern the levels of utility and warranty for each service.