A software company buys cleaning services for its offices and sells its own applications to clients. Which statement about its roles is correct?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 1. Key concepts of service management medium
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The options
Not correct It is a service provider only, because an organization that sells services cannot also be a consumer
Wrong. Nothing in ITIL restricts an organization to one role; almost every provider consumes services from others.
Correct It acts as a service consumer towards the cleaning firm and as a service provider towards its clients; provider and consumer are roles, not fixed identities
Correct. ITIL treats provider and consumer as roles an organization takes in a given service relationship, and any organization can hold both at once.
Not correct It is a service consumer only, because it is not an IT service provider by trade
Wrong, and it misreads the terms. The role depends on the relationship in question, not on the industry the organization sits in.
Not correct Towards the cleaning firm it is the sponsor rather than the service consumer, because its part in that relationship is to pay
Wrong, and it mixes two levels. Sponsor, customer and user are roles held by people or groups inside the consuming organization; service consumer is the role the organization itself takes in a relationship. The company is the service consumer, whoever inside it authorizes the spend.
Why
An organization is a person or a group of people with its own functions, responsibilities, authorities and relationships to achieve its objectives. Service provider and service consumer are roles an organization takes within a specific service relationship, so the same organization is routinely both, sometimes even towards the same counterpart.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 1
- What it says
- Organizations take the role of service provider or service consumer depending on the service relationship; the roles are not exclusive.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 1 and space the ones you get wrong.