The primary purpose of a Service Catalog is to document IT services and establish the foundation for other service management components. In essence, it clearly defines what services are available from the IT organization and aligns those services with the business goals and needs.
An IT Service Catalog can be a baseline for a Service Level Agreement, or even replace it in some cases. It also becomes the basis for documenting procedures and processes in your IT organization.
The benefits reaped through implementing a Service Catalog depend somewhat on the purpose it is intended to fulfill in an organization. If the Service atalog’s design includes measures of success for the service, it can provide a baseline for performance metrics that help identify areas needing improvement.
A Service Catalog can also assist support desk managers in defining the scope of support in an organization as it qualifies incidents. It can even help identify priorities for incidents based on their impact to business functions. From a customer perspective, a well-designed Service Catalog helps users identify what services are available to them and what the parameters of those services might be.
In organizations where a standard level of support is provided to all or most customers in the same way, the Service Catalog can become the de facto Service Level Agreement (SLA) for most users. Only those users requiring a different level of service will need to have an SLA and that SLA will only need to define what items differ from the standard Service Catalog. For some internal support organizations, a Service Catalog may be all that is ever needed.
Opportunity
A major publishing company wanted to begin the process of centralizing and optimizing the Service Desk function within their organization. In an effort to break the goal into achievable steps, Plexent and the client decided that developing a Service Catalog would be a solid first step in building a foundation and framework for corporate IT help desk services, while also increasing awareness and education around Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) principles that were part of the larger corporate strategy.
To begin, Plexent developed the organization’s IT Services Framework through facilitated sessions with the client using the tools found within itDNA.
Once this framework was established, an exhaustive inventory of all corporate IT services was taken. This framework and inventory provided a “menu” from which different components of the service catalog could be grouped and assigned to the appropriate service owners for content and feedback.
Detailed information for each of the services was then compiled into service definitions, the lowest level of the service catalog. The client chose to incorporate the following data in their service definitions:
- Service Description
- Support Contact
- Service Manager
- Users
- Inputs
- Outputs
- Default, Optional & Excluded Items
- Service Hours
- Scheduled Maintenance Hours
- Performance Standards
- Customer Procedures for Starting /Changing Service
- Service Cost (Charging is an optional activity per ITIL)
- Monitoring Tools
- Reporting Criteria
- Reporting Tools
- Escalation Thresholds
- Support Skill Sets Required
- Related Service Contracts / Contacts
Result
The resulting catalog was not only valuable list of IT services, but it alsprovided benefits outside the scope othe project including:
- A foundation for a corporate helpdesk knowledge base
- A framework that other areas of IT could use to easily catalog additional services
- A basis for resource management and staffing level calculations
- A key starting point in negotiating Operating Level Agreements (OLAs) and SLAs within the organization
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