Which statement best completes the ITIL definition of a service? A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without ...
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 1. Key concepts of service management easy
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The options
Not correct ... the customer having to agree service levels in advance.
Wrong. Agreed levels of performance are warranty, which is a separate concept. The definition says nothing about whether service levels are agreed beforehand.
Not correct ... the customer having to pay for the resources involved.
Wrong. Consumers normally do pay; the price is one of the costs a service imposes on the consumer. What the consumer avoids is having to manage the underlying costs and risks, not paying anything.
Not correct ... the provider having to understand the customer's business.
Wrong, and the reverse of ITIL's position. Value co-creation requires the provider to understand the consumer's desired outcomes; the definition never excuses the provider from that.
Correct ... the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.
Correct. The definition turns on the transfer of specific costs and risks away from the consumer; that transfer is a large part of why a consumer engages a provider at all.
Why
A service enables value co-creation by facilitating the consumer's desired outcomes while the provider absorbs specific costs and risks the consumer would otherwise have to manage. Note the word 'specific': the service does not remove all costs and risks, and it can even impose new ones (the price, or dependence on the provider).
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 1
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A provider delivers a payroll service. Each month it produces a set of payslip files and a bank payment instruction. As a result, the consumer's staff are paid accurately and on time. Which of these is an OUTCOME? machine-checked
- A finance director approves the annual budget that pays for a collaboration service, but never logs into it. Which service consumer role is the finance director playing? machine-checked
- Which description matches the CUSTOMER role in a service relationship? machine-checked
- A video conferencing service can host meetings of up to 200 participants and record them. It is available 99.9% of the time and all recordings are encrypted at rest. Which part of this description is UTILITY? machine-checked
- Which statement about warranty is correct? machine-checked
- An organization moves its email from self-hosted servers to a subscription service. It no longer buys or patches mail servers, but it now pays a monthly fee and must train its service desk on the new administration console. Which statement correctly classifies these costs from the consumer's perspective? machine-checked