Service Catalog - What is your focus area.?
Looking at the Gartner Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, issued in June 2007, many of the up-and-coming products including IT Service Catalog, IT Service Portfolio Management, etc are catered for in ITIL V3. In V3, the Service Catalog concept have been enhanced and coupled with Demand Management, Portfolio Management and Request fulfillment. With the expectations from service catalog on a rise, organizations need to plan carefully to choosing what "functions" they want to deliver with their Service catalog program.
Service catalog has a wide set of customers with varying expectations. For business customers, it is a tool to see what they need from IT to support the business. For service providers, it is a tool to justify the cost against the value they provide. For end-users, it is a new channel to request and avail IT services. Unless the catalog cater for the diversified needs of its audience in right proportions, the chances of its adoption are minimal.
Who is important to you? How are you balancing the needs of Service customers, providers and end-users.?
There is a growing trend where organizations start their service catalog journey, by enabling request view of services through the implementation of request catalogs available in the market. The request based catalog will help streamline service requests that are often raised by IT end-users (eg: request for a software update, request for a monitoring script deployment, etc). But request catalogs are definitely not the end of service catalog journey, rather a start. Organizations need to "think outside the request view" and need to put considerable thought and effort in structuring the service catalog as a tool to demonstrate service value to the business customers and end-users.
How are you planning to demonstrate values through service catalog?
Business customers do not want to see service transactions at a request level (refer the above example). They would rather be interested in seeing how these low level transactions are supporting specific service offerings that they had agreed upon with the IT organization at a higher level (eg: How does the software update service by a specific support team perform against the Desktop management service offering) . They need the capability to dynamically build service portfolios based on available options, demand patterns and consumption and also to fund for services based on their needs and service's performance potential.
Like any other service centric initiative, developing a service strategy is the key to service catalog program. The service strategy needs to be defined in the context of delivering "value" to service customers. ITIL V3 provide insights to create a service strategy.
I will talk about this in my next blog.
In the meanwhile, have you defined a service strategy yet? How does the strategy look like?
