In this blog, we will discuss how an organization can
leverage the concepts of Service Catalog and Service Portfolio to drive Service
Management culture. In my previous blogs, we have already discussed how given
business process will need one or more business services to enable it. And,
business services can be shared across multiple business processes. If we
further go one level down, we will see that one or more technical services are
needed to realize a given business service and these are mostly shared by one
or more business services. If you identify and document Business Services and
Technical Services provided by the IT organization that becomes your Service
Catalog.
Note that new market drivers lead to the development of new
or refined business processes. From IT perspective, these new business
processes will create new demand for IT to develop and deliver new business
services. In most organizations, such endeavors to deliver new business
services are achieved through project management. Similarly, if there are any
business processes that are being retired and the demand for associated
business services is going to diminish, plan needs to be made to manage the
retirement of those business services and relevant (unshared) components. For
example, if amazon.com decides to start to offer its customers to be able to
sell their items through bidding process, it will result in the design and
development of new business processes and will require associated business
services to enables those business processes. Depending upon the service level
requirements (SLR), warranty of these business services need to be designed and
delivered to meet the business needs.
Service Catalog is a menu of items (business services and
technical services) offered by the IT organization. If there are any business
services on the Service Catalog that do not add value and / or do not enable
any of the business processes, that is a potential leak and IT organization
must assess whether it should continue to offer those services. According to
ITILv3, Service Catalog should contain all operational as well as retired
services. This may be tailored based on organizational specific needs. I had
some clients who used Service Catalog as a source to market new and upcoming
services as well. Mostly, they included services that were going to be offered
(were scheduled to go live within 4 weeks) soon. So, it really depends upon the
organization how it wants to use Service Catalog. The purpose remains the same
i.e., to clearly communicate to the businesses / customers on what IT
organization offers and to ensure that these business services are aligned with
business processes. Service Portfolio, on the other hand, includes all retired,
operational and future services.
