USMBOK™: Key Concepts

The Service Transaction Engine

The Service Provider Organization's "Heart" and Primary Means of Service Customer Expectations

The service transaction engine (STE) represents the collective processing of transactions or 'requests for service' by all the service provider applications and information systems.

The STE typically processes the vast percentage of the service provider workload, efficiently, effectively, automatically, and more often than not - unseen. The existence of a STE is generally ignored by most service management and best practice frameworks.

When systems, applications and infrastructure within the STE encounter issues they manifest as problems and incidents, and are managed by the event and support lifecycles.

Non STE events would include the non-incident related service requests and any event that demands manual intervention. These type of events include:

• Add new employee
• Requests for information
• Requests for change (upgrade, non-incident related changes)
• Access rights

Non-STE events may well be processed eventually, after manual intervention, by the STE. Similarly, STE events may require manual intervention, and then be returned to the STE for automated processes.

The higher the percentage of service requests processed by the STE, the higher the customer satisfaction level and overall quality of service.