How can Service Catalog enable optimal management of Value Chains?

Depending upon the type of the request submitted, Request Routing Engine should perform request classification / categorization and route the requests to the appropriate process. Note that this Request Routing Engine may be as simple as a spreadsheet or as intelligent as business-rule based workflow engine.

Mature IT organizations are able to leverage Service Catalog to truly align its technical capabilities to meet the expectations established using the Service Catalog and Service Level Management processes.

All services listed in the Service Catalog need to be managed to ensure that they deliver the desired level of utility and warranty to the customers of these services such that these services are deemed valuable and serve as a means of delivering value. Capabilities of an IT organization to be able to manage and deploy its resources and ensure that the services that it offers deliver the desired value is called service management. Some of the key goals that need to be achieved by implementing service management are as follows:

• Service Level Requirements of services listed in the Service Catalog must be clearly documented and understood. 

• Service Level Management must ensure that achievable targets are established.

• Request Fulfillment must ensure that high-volume low-risk requests are managed effectively and efficiently in as much automated manner as possible

• Service Desk must be the single point of contact for the customers.

• Configuration Management Systems (tools and databases) must be optimized to ensure that the right quality of data are available to support decision making.

• Configuration Item (CI) relationships must be established such that these support the end-to-end management of services. Auto discovery tools are limited in their capabilities. CI relationships development and capturing of useful information is mostly a manual effort. For a medium to large size organization, it means significant investments. Targeted efforts focused on value creation are necessary.
• Change Management and Release and Deployment Management processes are optimized to ensure that changes are effectively planned and efficiently deployed into the production environment. For high impact services in the Service Catalog, custom change models may be defined.

• Incident models are defined for critical services to ensure that those services may be brought back to operations (in case of an incident) as soon as possible.

• Event Management capabilities are developed for those critical IT components that are supporting critical business services.

• And so on.

The main message here is not everything is important. Keep the 80/20 rule in mind when planning to implement service management i.e., let’s improve 20% of services that make 80% of the impact. The end goal of service management implementation is to identify the Value Chain for a given business process and ensure that all CIs that implement that Value Chain are managed effectively. This will enable IT to manage customer expectations and deliver IT services at the desired levels.