As mentioned in my blog yesterday "Driving Business Integration, Service Portfolio or Service Catalog", many IT organizations confuse their IT service portfolio with a service request catalog. It has been my recent experience the acceleration of virtualization and private cloud has led to a rush to automation with the service catalog as the user or consumer interface. Rather than a business service catalog, typically the catalog is “request” system for technical requests with the automation allowing for reduction of errors and reducing time to delivery. Based on my discussions with organizations who have gone down this route it seems the end result is that they avoid the difficult debates with the business over the portfolio, its value, appropriate cost and decisions of timings for retirement of the environment.

The Service Portfolio is the manifestation of the IT organization's mission, role and capabilities. The Service Portfolio empowers the IT organization to develop the appropriate financial and service-level disciplines necessary to ensure appropriate investments, based on business value covering the business service from cradle to grave. On the other hand the catalog is the instantiation of the production service that is typically represented as an orderable item often in a self service catalog.

My experience confirms that most organizations overly rely on the service catalog as the communication mechanism to the business. This is a mistake as it is only a view of production services at a certain point in time. Forward thinking IT organizations are using the Service Portfolio to capture all demand. The demand includes all planned innovation, ideas, bug corrections, planned projects and so on. Then the demand is prioritized based on business appetite, risk, funding, business criticality, etcetera, and approved demand is tracked to delivery when it is made available in the catalog. Sounds simple doesn't it? Yet, over and over I see that having the business make the decisions is a difficult place to start.

My tip of the day today: If you are having a portfolio discussion with the business do not start with a blank sheet and ask them to define their demand or services, you may not like their response.