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• Lower service provision error rates
• IT operational cost reductions
• Without a Service Catalog, customers are unable to
identify what products and services are available.
•
Incident management resolution is faster
and cheaper
—it is easier to quickly diagnose
incidents and also identify their relevant
business priority with the combination of the Service
Catalog and Confguration Management Database.
•
Problemmanagement is more slick and
intelligent
—similarly, root cause analysis can be
better performed when there is a logical link that can
be traced from Confguration Item to Service Catalog.
•
Change management can be more business and
risk aware
. Risk analysis of changes and releases is
again more business-focused as the relevant business
services associated with CIs can be tracked.
•
Services can be monitored, managed, and
delivered at diferent levels
—so some services
may have a low-cost focus, while others are based
on quality and business-driven implementation
timescales
•
Reporting can be delivered at multiple levels,
including service levels
, where this applies
to business services, not just IT services and
components. Thus, the IT organization can really
start to demonstrate its contribution and value to the
business
•
Change and transition can be more agile and
support business imperatives
—i.e., time to market
and time to value. It is simply easier and faster to
change and implement new systems if they are better
understood and defned by the IT organization.
•
The service catalog facilitates multi-level
management and monitoring of (diferentiated)
services
—so IT departments can focus on delivering
and demonstrating value from their services.
This is an example of Service Value Management—
i.e., having that capability to manage, deliver, and
monitor business services across the IT estate, often
with diferent areas of focus, so some services will be
cost driven and others driven by quality and time-to-
market.
Dual Aspects of the Service Catalog
Customer-focused
Service Level Management should ensure that the
design of the Service Catalog is focused on customer
needs. The most common mistake IT departments
make is to document their services from an IT
perspective throughout their entire Service Catalog.
The customers do not want to review detailed service
descriptions in “IT-speak”; they want to see services
described in terms they can understand, written
in non-technical terminology, and addressing an
immediate concern or need.
An efective service catalog also segments the
customers who may access the catalog—whether
end users or business unit executives—and provides
diferent content based on function, roles, needs,
locations, and entitlements.
This customer-focused approach helps ensure that
the service catalog is adopted by customers and
provides the basis for a balanced, business-level
discussion on service quality and cost trade-ofs with
business decision-makers.
Technically-focused
The more technically focused aspect of the catalog,
which does not form part of the customer view, not
only contains details of all the IT service delivered
to the customer together with relationships to
the supporting services, but the shared services,
components, and confguration items necessary
to support the provision of the service to the
organization is also included.
The technical details of a service may matter to IT—
and perhaps they should matter to the customers of
IT—but the simple fact is that the customers of IT are
too busy to be bothered about whether the e-mail
system’s SLA is 99.999% or 99.98% up time or whether
the Help Desk average call wait time is 30 seconds
or 60 seconds. They just want e-mail to work and
someone to answer the phone when they call.
What value does a Service
Catalog deliver?