Service Catalog

A service catalog, as defined in ITIL Service Delivery, is a list of services that an organization provides, often to its employees or customers. Each service within the catalog typically includes:

* A description of the service

* Timeframes or service level agreement for fulfilling the service

* Who is entitled to request/view the service

* Costs (if any)

* How to fulfill the service

A User's Perspective (example)

A user goes to a website to search for a specific service, such as a requesting a new laptop, requesting a change in benefits, or adding a new employee to a department. The service catalog site groups services by category and allows for searching (especially when hundreds or thousands of services are available). The userselects a desired service and sees the description and details. The user enters any pertinent information (contact information, service-specific questions) and submits the request for service. The request requires approval, and goes throughrouting, service-level management, and other processes necessary tofulfill the request. The user may return to the site later to check on the status of a request, or to view overall metrics on how well the organization is performing the services it provides.

A Business Unit Manager's Perspective

Business Unit Managers determine what services to "publish" to end-users via the service catalog. Business Unit Managers and Analysts would determine what questions are to be asked of the user, any approvals necessary for a request, and what other systems or processes are needed to fulfill the request. Once the service is defined and the fulfillment process organized, these people or a more technical employee would build the requisite functionality into the service definition and then publish this to the service catalog.

An Example

A good example of a service catalog and this process is the startup of a new employee. This would involve:

1. A business unit manager or analyst (referred to as a service author) documents the current process. For a new employee this likely includes finding a workspace, ordering a phone, ordering a network connection, ordering a computer, creating a login, and applying any application group permissions and other security items. Some of these items (ordering a phone, ordering a computer) can be done in parallel, while other tasks may need to be sequential (likely need a corporate login prior to applying any group permissions). 2. A service author determines what the service level agreements are for each of these tasks as well as the service level for all of the tasks combined. For a new employee, this is likely a number of days. 3. A service author determines any approvals that are needed for this request. Here, a Director or Vice President often has to approve any hires, as well as an HR representative. 4. A service author determines any costs for the service. For a new hire, the department likely gets charged for the space, computer and phone from the fulfilling department such as IT and Facilities. 5. Once the services are defined the service author would publish these services to the organization. Here, service catalog software is used to publish this service to an intranet along with categorizing it for easy retrieval by employees. 6. Once the service is published a department manager would go to the service catalog on the company intranet and request the service for a new employee filling out the required form information. 7. The request is routed to the required approvers and the service level monitoring begins via the service catalog software. 8. Once approvals are complete (often via their own form), the request is routed to the various applications for each individual fulfillment task that was defined by the author in step 1. This may be manual processes or integrations to other applications. 9. The department author goes back to the service catalog to check on his or her requests. They may see that this request has had the facilities approval and the workspace defined, but the request is still waiting on delivery of the computer and phone. 10. Once all of the fulfillment tasks are complete, the requester (Department Manager here) gets notified that the request has been completed. The service level metrics are compiled and available for future requestors.

External links

* [http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3520901 How to Produce An Actionable IT Service Catalog]
* [http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3691561 The Eight Essential Elements of an IT Service Lifecycle]

ee also

* IT Governance
* IT Service Management
* IT Portfolio Management

References

DuMoulin, Fine, Flores. "Defining IT Success through the IT Service Catalog", Van Haren Publishing. ISBN 978-9077212967