Identifying Important Business Services
How firms identify important business services by the harm a disruption would cause to customers, markets and the wider system, service by service, before tolerances are set.
Line 02: Important business services
How to identify the services whose disruption would cause intolerable harm, who uses them, and where the boundary of a service sits.
The line guide
Working guides on this line
Documenting a Service Inventory
How to document a service inventory so that each important service, its users, its harm reasoning and its owner can be found, challenged and kept current.
Important Services and Outsourced Services
Why outsourcing does not transfer an important service, and how to identify services whose delivery depends on suppliers, processors and platforms, and what stays with the firm.
Important Services in Insurance
Which insurance services count as important: reporting and handling claims, maintaining cover, and the servicing customers rely on after a loss occurs.
Important Services in Payments
Which payment services count as important, from everyday transfers and card payments to settlement, and how timing and irrevocability shape the harm they cause.
Important Services in Retail Banking
Which retail banking services count as important: access to deposits, cash, payments from accounts, and the support customers need when access fails suddenly.
Important Services Shared Across the Firm
When a shared function such as authentication, customer data or a contact centre counts as important in its own right, and how its failure spreads across services.
Mapping Service Users and Harm
How to map who uses a service and what harm a disruption would cause each group, starting from the user journey rather than from internal systems and structures.
Reviewing Important Services After Change
How to review important services after change, so that new products, migrations, supplier moves and incidents update the list instead of quietly outdating it.
Service Boundaries and Sub-Services
Where one important service ends and another begins, and when a shared function or a sub-service needs its own boundary, owner and tolerance treatment.
What Counts as an Important Business Service
When a service counts as important: the harm, user and substitutability questions that separate a genuinely important service from an ordinary internal process.