What are JSM Services?

[Irina Mosina _TechTime_]

Hi there, 

As Solution Partners, we deal with all sorts of complex scenarios for Jira Service Management implementation and recently we started coming across more and more customers who are concerned about a lack of guidance around Jira Service Management's definition of Services. 

What are Services? 

How do you define them? 

How do they link to Teams and Responders? 

How do they relate to Assets? 

How do you choose to map the out-of-box Object Schema called "Services" which is normally used in the default field Affected Services to the list of everything that we need to track? 

Is it to depict the relationship between our other custom objects? 

Is it to list all of our organisation's applications or capabilities and use it to automate the Responders team assignment? 

Clearly we, as JSM experts 👔,  know answers to those questions, but if they pop up repeatedly, we can do a better job educating our customers about this topic. 

So I thought I'd reach out to the collective brain and see if this is a common set of questions that especially new to JSM teams are pondering on and if there are more of them. 

I would love to hear your different use cases and the challenges you've had. 

In the meantime, I will start working on a little best-practices article that I hope will help with some practical shortcuts and hands-on advice. 

[Davide Cioranu]

Hi Irina,
I'm glad to have found this on the community, I cannot find any detailed instruction available to end users which go in depth into the options available.
The only article available does not provide a clear description and usage of each field What are services? | Jira Service Management Cloud | Atlassian Support.

All the questions you listed are currently what I'm trying to get my head around. 
Taking as example any generic IT team, what would each Service type be used for?
I presume business services would be something used not directly used by the IT department, but more to define services the business offers, in that way these could be tied to the Software services or applications (e.g. Business offers Transportation services which could be linked to Software services which support those services). 

For the application type, I presume this is specific to client applications? Or would SaaS also fall under this?