Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

- You have a wide range of choice in terms of the goods available and you can compare the prices of different brands

- You don't have to commute to multiple stores in the city to complete your shopping list and can be done in a fairly enclosed geography

- You can bill all types of items at one counter without having to hop around product specific counters

- What's more they usually publish up-to-date information on new products, discounts in local newspapers and handouts at the stores

Overall such hypermarkets provide a great one-stop-shopping experience to the customers that includes better service, competitive prices and greater choice. Ever wondered if your IT customer was looking for a similar experience when it comes to IT services you are providing. I see the IT Service Catalog as a virtual Hypermarket which can potentially enable similar experience.

IT services in most organization would have been existing in one form or the other and most likely built upon disjointed legacy systems like the good old "mom & pop" stores. My view is that organizations need a structured approach for migration of services from legacy systems to an IT service catalog. Typical examples of IT services are:

- Procurement of IT hardware and assets like laptops, cellphones, Blackberry's for employees

- Services related to administration and management of IT applications and assets

- Monitoring services for IT infrastructure and applications and so on..

The need for organizations to review their IT services portfolios and better organize them to understand the services landscape, performance and costs related to the provision has been further reinforced in the ITIL V3 refresh.

Current economic conditions make it even more critical for us to understand, appreciate and leverage the cost models around IT services. To quote my esteemed colleague and an avid blogger Ramshankar Ramdattan "IT will be brave enough to expose pricing when it has a better grip on costs". The IT Service Catalog can be a very effective starting point in unraveling the mystery around IT services.

The point I wish to bring out here is that while organizations have a sense of the IT services being requested, provisioned and associated demand and supply mechanisms the migration from multiple legacy systems towards a single Service Catalog interface should be driven through a well defined strategy.

The temptation to treat the migration of the services into the IT Service Catalog as typical application or technology oriented migration could seriously dent the ability to understand the service landscape and potentially delay the consolidation of services into the catalog.

The Service Lifecycle view instead of an Application Lifecycle view can be a better guidance for the service migration initiatives. It is also recommended that the Service Design include two distinct phases such as Business Service Design that delivers a logical service landscape model and Technical Service Design that delves into tool configuration, field level mappings and other implementation aspects.

In one of our recent consulting engagements with a global financial institution we helped bring in the ITIL V3 Service Lifecycle perspective into the IT services migration methodology and modeled the Service Design phase along the principles mentioned above. Through the Business Service Design we were able to capture the critical service characteristics such as Actors, Processes, Systems involved in the request and fulfillment stages. This information can serve as valuable service documentation throughout the Service Lifecycle.

I believe this was a critical distinction and service orientation we introduced to enable the consolidation of the "mom & pop stores" kind of IT services into a structured IT Service Catalog "Hypermarket".