#Entry 12 - Service Catalogue

During one of the recent conversations with a potential client, we started discussing their current and planned state of the Service Catalogue. While to the ITIL experts it might be a simple yet important concept, during the several conversations that I have had with the multitude of IT managers, I have noticed that this remains an oft neglected piece of the ITSM puzzle. In case you are reading this and wondering what a Service Catalogue is, the formal definition of a service catalogue or a service catalog (if you are following the American way of life) is as follows:

“The service catalogue is a database or structured document with information about all live IT services, including those available for deployment. The service catalogue is the only part of the service portfolio published to customers and is used to support the sale and delivery of IT services. “

TSO. (2011). ITIL? Service Design.

In plain speak, it is a list of IT services that a service provider offers. However, not everyone might have access to or need to see all the services on offer. This is where the ITIL concept of views comes. A simple two-view service catalogue might consist of a business service catalogue and a technical service catalogue where the former is the list of services that your customer sees and can select from whereas the latter will have customer-facing services along with the relationships to the supporting services, shared services, and other components.

The structure of the service catalogue should be reflective of an organisation’s business and its products/ services. To make this possible, the service catalogue needs to be linked to the organisation’s IT strategy, the architecture, and the portfolio. Some of the questions that need to be answered in this regard are:

-?????????Who are the audience for the service catalogue views (in some cases it is better to have a three-view catalogue instead of a simple two-view one)?

-?????????Which services need to be included in the business-facing service catalogue?

-?????????How to identify the right set of service attributes which will be sufficient to describe all the services and be applicable to all the services?

-?????????How is the service catalogue updated and at what frequency?

Based on my experience of working with many a service catalogue, I have no hesitation in saying that designing a service catalogue that serves its true purpose is both an art and a science. Designing of a service catalogue is also subject to continual improvement where some of the sources of improvement can be changes in organisation’s structure and strategy, systematic reviews, feedback from users and technology prospects.

Some of the KPIs that ITIL 2011 suggests including the below:

-?????????Percentage increase in the number of services recorded and managed within the service catalogue as a percentage of those being delivered and transitioned in production

-?????????Percentage reduction in the number of variances detected between the information contained within the service catalogue and the live environment

-?????????Percentage increase in completeness of the customer-facing views of the service catalogue against operational services

-?????????Percentage increase in business user survey responses showing knowledge of services listed in service catalogue

-?????????Increase in measured business user access to intranet-based service catalogue

-?????????Percentage increase in completeness of supporting services against the IT components that make up those services

If you want a taste of how a technical view of a Service Catalogue may look, I suggest taking a peek at the Google Cloud Service Catalog ( Service Catalog quickstart?|?Google Cloud)