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General Guidelines for Building Effective Service Catalogs
Abstract
This white paper briefly describes what a service catalog is, the types of service catalogs, and a real-world analog to an IT service catalog. Furthermore, this paper listed 6 general guidelines a business can use to ensure that service catalog projects accomplish their intended goals. By including these guidelines in their approach to creating service catalogs, organizations are more likely to establish clear and manageable boundaries with their service catalogs, which ultimately leads to a realization of the benefits and value promised by service catalogs.
Sample
Introduction
Service catalogs are an important topic to most organizations pursing the adoption of service management best practices. Many service management adoption programs begin with the creation of a service catalog. Unfortunately, service catalog projects can be risky and costly, and often fail to deliver their promised benefits. However, organizations can realize the benefits of service catalogs if they follow the guidelines ITIL® provides, supplemented with the real-world experience from those organizations that have successfully implemented service catalogs. This paper presents a basic overview of service catalogs and provides some general guidelines for building effective service catalogs based on the real-world experiences of several organizations.
What Is a Service Catalog?
Simply put, a service catalog is a boundary.
The boundary that a service catalog establishes clearly communicates the services that a service provider chooses to provide to its customers. A service catalog is a structured grouping of live services that are available to customers. Typically a service catalog provides information about a number of services, and will typically define the following:
A description of each service
The price of each service and how charging occurs
The owner of each service
How to order each service
Based on context, organizations can add additional information to their service catalogs to meet the needs of their customers.
Service catalogs can be presented in two ways. First, there is a business/customer view of the service catalog that describes the details of services that are directly available to customers along with the business processes that are supported by those services. Second, there is a technical/supporting service catalogue view that contains details of underlying IT services with their relationship to the services in the business service catalog. The way in which a service catalog is presented defines a boundary. A business service catalog is intended for use by the business and, as such, this boundary will typically not include technically oriented services, whereas a technical service catalog is intended for a more technical audience and will typically include technically oriented services.
The best way to understand service catalogs is to look at real-world examples. The most common and familiar real-world representation of a service catalog is the menu at a restaurant. The menus at most restaurants list the "services" or "items" that customers can purchase. The menu defines a boundary. For example, if the restaurant only has hamburgers on the menu, it's very unlikely that a customer would be able to order egg rolls. In effect, restaurants use their service catalog to define a clear boundary so that customers understand what can and cannot be ordered.
In addition to a menu, restaurants will typically have a way that they order all of the components of the items on their menu. For example, a restaurant that only serves hamburgers will need a way to order meat, buns, pickles, onions, tomatoes, etc. Often, restaurants will have a behind-the-scenes catalog that their staff uses to order these components.
To see this in action, go to almost any restaurant and attempt to order a bag of onions. In all but the most extreme cases, this can't be done because the restaurant has defined a clear boundary with their menu of the services that can be ordered. Typically, bags of onions are not one of those services. However, the manager of the restaurant has a way to replenish components, such as onions, and typically interfaces with a behind-the scenes equivalent to a technical services catalog that allows him to do things such as order bags of onions.
The issue with many IT organizations is that they fail to establish a clear boundary, like a menu, with the business for the services that they can order. In effect, they have such a porous boundary that the business is allowed to come into the kitchen and not only order bags of onions, but also do the equivalent of ordering 12 different types of onions in different cuts. Such inconsistency often leads to higher cost and lower quality.
Effectively, a service catalog establishes a boundary and, because of that boundary, service providers are able to better control and market the services they provide.
General Guidelines for Building Service Catalogs
This is not another white paper about why your organization needs a service catalog. The benefits are clear. Where service catalogs typically fall short is in their implementation. There are numerous industry stories of companies spending too much money and taking too long to produce a service catalog that no one wanted to use. The point of this paper is to briefly describe a few general guidelines that tend to contribute to the successful implementation of a service catalog.
Related Courses
ITIL® Foundation
ITIL® Service Capability: Release, Control, and Validation
ITIL® Service Capability: Service Offerings and Agreements
ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Operation
ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Transition
ITIL® Service Capability: Operational Support and Analysis
ITIL® Service Capability: Planning, Protection, and Optimization
ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Strategy
ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Design
ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Continual Service Improvement
ITIL® Service Capability: Planning, Protection, and Optimization
ITIL®: Managing Across the Lifecycle
