Wednesday, December 5, 2012

"Service Catalog" - A Gateway Into IT


Having gained this understanding of the Service Portfolio and Service Catalog, let’s now see how these are used by different roles within a business enterprise and the role of Service Catalog in the day-to-day operations of the IT service provider’s organization.

·      Management (both business as well as IT) may use Service Portfolio to Strategize for New Services and to Plan to retire Old Services.

·      Customer (both from business as well as IT) may use Business Service View of the Service Catalog to Place Request for Service, to Check Status, to Report Problems, and to Submit New Ideas. Depending upon the role of the customer, s/he may be provided a different view into the Service Catalog and may even see different offerings and tiers all together. In addition, if IT service provider is providing services to multiple lines of businesses, depending upon your role and which line of business you belong to, an appropriate view of the Service Catalog may be made visible.

·      IT may use Technical Service View of the Service Catalog to “Build relationships between SLAs, OLAs, & UCs and to Identify Technology Needs.”

If something is not on the Service Catalog, it is not there because it was probably not worth offering. All IT activities (performed mostly by technical functions – Application Management and Technical Management) must contribute towards the design and development of new services and towards maintaining, operating and improving existing services and / or retiring those services that are no longer needed.

Service Catalog shows all the services provided by the IT. Depending upon the different channels that you may have provided to your customers, your customers may choose to call the Service Desk to initiate the request or use the Inter-active (online) Service Catalog to do the same. You will notice that there can be a small number of clearly defined request types that can be initiated by the customer using the Service Catalog. These may include the following:

  • Open a new account 
  • Change existing plan
  • Report a problem
  • Submit a new idea
Depending upon organizational needs and the type of the service, there may be more or fewer types of requests. However, the message that I am trying to convey is simple,

Service Catalog is the gateway into the IT and should list all services provided by the IT and the types of requests that can be placed on those services.

 In my upcoming blogs, we will discuss how Service Catalog will enable the full lifecycle management of requests initiated by the customers. 

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