#SMFlashBook – My Best Tip for building the Service Catalog

How to spot the most important services

[This post is part of a worldwide flashbook or flashblog, where many contributors simultaneously publish on the topic of “My top tip for building a service catalogue”. I took this paragraph from Rob’s post]

In short: Ask line of business managers what one IT service would hurt most if unavailable.

Vintage menu, some rights reserved

The Service Catalog has a special unique characteristic: It uses end user language – not IT lingo!

So, in order to get the right services and have it as complete as possible, you can’t fail if you ask them. It’s a good idea to start with the most critical services in order to understand what really matters to the customer.

Extra tip: If they can’t come up with one, then ask them what most frequent complaints their users have regarding IT services.

More from ITIL Blues:

• A Mush&Room cartoon on service request catalog here.
• A diagram for service catalog context within ITIL aqui.
• The difference between service catalog and service request catalog täällä.
• A different view on service catalog, depending on perspective ici.

Service [Request?] Catalog

The main confusion I’ve seen lately among customers and colleagues is being able to distinguish between Service Catalog and Service Request Catalog.

Take it or leave it, from Flickr, by D Siegnowski, Some Rights Reserved

Keep this short (my aim is to make you access the resources at the end):

• Service Request Catalog refers to what a user can ask for
• Service Catalog is all an IT service provider offers to its customers

One can look at the Service Catalog in many ways. I find it useful to take the elephant in two portions, like this:

• Internal supporting services; i.e those that support services delivered to customer
• Business services; i.e all services the customer perceives

For the Business services I further detail in two:

• Service Request Catalog; i.e services requested on demand by end users (some times only a selected few that have the authority/need to do so)
• Continuous services; i.e services that IT delivers permanently (well, within service hours) like applications

Thus, activities around Business Relationship Management and Service Level Management capture customer representatives experience whereas Service Desk take care of end users experience.

You can watch good stuff on this by Ian Clayton here or read a post by Doug Mueller.

Wisdom is never on the menu, you have to own the restaurant – Carrie Latet

Business Service Orchestration

Maestrina, by Leo Nabuco @ Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

This paper shared by Jan is good read on service catalog and how one should look at it. For starters we should look from the point of view of the ones using it.

End users and business managers (customers) see and expect different – even if related – outcomes from IT services. As referenced in the paper, Joe Peppard distinguishes two types of value of IT services:

User utility – Which is defined as the benefit a user or community of users attaches to a particular service, based on the usefulness of the service to them in the performance of their jobs.

Organizational benefit – Which is based on the extent to which the service supports the organization in achieving its business objectives.

Mush and Room #11: Service Catalog

Service Catalog (Mush and Room à la carte)

Why I believe in SPACL

Sparkle by Ian Varley at Flickr - Some rights reserved

I believe in SPACL (Service Portfolio and Catalog Language) for it is focused on the service, on the people that use them. And it is in the middle of quite a lot of Service Management activities.

It is open, freely available and addresses hard problems for customer, service providers and vendors:

• Aims to define clearly what is a service and other too often conflicting Service Management core concepts
• Covers interoperability needs. It includes independent specification for service offerings, service requests. This is vital for cloud models, virtualization, multiple and changing supplier scenarios.

So. Visit them, get in. Help balancing it more for you (vendors “sparcled” it – someone had to!). Do something.

Service Portfolio and Service Catalogue and… – ITIL v3

 

 

After a comment from IT Skeptic for the previous Service Catalogue – ITIL v3 post, I’ve drawn this diagram hoping it will give a clearer picture on this topic (it is heavily based upon Figure 3.7 from the Service Design core book) .

Service Catalogue – ITIL v3

A good introductory definition for Service Catalogue inside Service Strategy ITIL v3 core book goes like this:

“The Service Catalogue is the subset of the Service Portfolio visible to customers. It consists of services presently active in the Service Operation phase and those approved to be readily offered to current or prospective customers. Items can enter the Service Catalogue only after due diligence has been performed on related costs and risks. Resources are engaged to fully support active services.”

 

The Service Catalogue is the tip of the iceberg from the Customers point of view.

ITIL v3 – Rodrigo Flores on Service Operation

Rodrigo Flores has been a champion for the Service Catalog. He’s co-author of the Defining IT Success through the Service Catalog book with Troy DuMoulin.

He’s been doing lots of reading lately and started with the ITIL v3 core book Service Operation.

He posted his comments here.