Recently I have been speaking with many of you on the Service Catalog and its function and use. The ITIL V3 Glossary defines the service Catalog as:
"A database or structured Document with information about all Live IT Services, including those available for Deployment. The Service Catalog is the only part of the Service Portfolio published to Customers, and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT Services. The Service Catalog includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, ordering and request processes."
It's certainly a workable definition and I am sure that you are all familiar with buying items from a catalog. For example, every time you visit a restaurant you order from a menu (or catalog) and if you use Amazon, that's another instance when you're using a catalog. What all these have in common is a price, description of what you get for your investment and a service level. For example when I was in a particular burger chain recently I noticed the average serving time on the register, 48 seconds on one register and 55 on the servers on their left.
IT's consumer community is ready to use a Service Catalog, but we need to position the entries in our Catalog appropriately.
With this in mind, I recently asked several itSMF colleagues globally how they define a service and what is in their catalog? It was interesting that I got the ITIL V3 Glossary of terms definition as a response in several cases.
|
Service:
A means of delivering value to Customers by facilitating Outcomes Customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific Costs and Risks. |
The key word in this definition is "value." It opens up additional questions: What is value? What do consumers perceive as value? And more importantly recognizing that value is not made up of simple a financial metric. For instance, in the case of ordering a meal in a restaurant, the value includes the delivery of the food which has been well prepared and meets all food preparation standards. But these "value" items don't go on the menu.
Many IT organizations have great desires to deliver IT services and list them using business language in a service catalog. Many also lack the business skills to communicate complex IT Services in that business language effectively. Those organizations need to work out this scenario or they could soon find themselves with fewer service consumers!
I was speaking with a an IT professional at a recent itSMF event who told me that IT was not delivering change fast enough and the business department simply went to the "Cloud" and found they could purchase and consume the application services required and pay for only the service consumed!
I am a strong supporter of various cloud models and we can learn a lot from that model in how they "sell" their services (more on how to leverage and manage the cloud in a future blog).
Another way to learn from others as you develop a service catalog is again through the restaurant example. Trip to your favorite restaurant this weekend and see how it balances all aspects of service including decor, ambiance, menu, price, service and food quality, and document what you perceive as service. On Monday visit one of your business departments and follow the same process. With that information, you can be on the road to a successful service catalog! And I'll be speaking about service catalog tomorrow at the itSMF conference in Finland.