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The IT Service Catalog
- Common Pitfalls and
How to Avoid Them
By Rodrigo Fernando Flores, Founder and Chief Technology Of? cer, newScale, Inc.
newScale White PaperThe IT Service Catalog - Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Table of Contents ...
Introduction ..............................................................................................................1
Why Do You Need a Service Catalog? ..........................................................1
Four Common Service Catalog Mistakes ........................................................2
Conclusion ................................................................................................................5Introduction
Introduction ...More and more IT organizations are embarking on their IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) journey and creating a Service Catalog - either as the foundation of their shift to a more service-oriented approach or simply as an element of the Service Level Management process. As the chief technology of? cer for newScale, I talk with dozens of IT managers each month who are interested in producing a Service Catalog.
Over time, I have seen a wide range of Service Catalog initiatives - from the very successful to ? at-out failures. From this broad spectrum of experiences, clear patterns have emerged. I've seen the same mistakes made in many of the failures, and found common attributes associated with the successes. Whether you call them best practices or hard-won wisdom, there are clearly lessons to be learned from these experiences. "The Service Catalog This white paper is intended to share some of those lessons learned and suggesting is a key tenet of ITIL, ways you can achieve success by avoiding the most common pitfalls. But before we which explains the talk about the typical mistakes in creating a Service Catalog, let's brie? y review rise of interest and adoption. It delivers its purpose. a clear, intuitive way for business customers Why Do You Need A Service Catalog? ... to understand and The primary purpose of a Service Catalog is to communicate how IT can help request the services internal business customers and end users do their jobs. A successful Service that IT provides. It also provides a Catalog helps the business understand the value that IT delivers - answering the platform for tracking questions, "What does IT do?", and "How well does IT do it?" And by mapping IT the status of requests services more explicitly to business needs, the IT organization can better understand and performance how to add even more value. This aspect of the Service Catalog helps address against the services three of the most emotional words in the IT vocabulary: "IT-Business Alignment." offered through the The Service Portfolio Catalog can also provide a vehicle to realistically set - and catalog. meet - business expectations. One of the common complaints we hear is that IT The Takeaway: never meets its deadlines. You may think you're delivering what the business wants, Service catalogs are when they want it. But without a Service Portfolio to clearly articulate what will be often cited as the delivered and when, at what price and what service level, your internal customers' quickest win for the expectations are likely to be very different than you think they are. IT organization." - Dennis Gaughan, In addition, a Service Request Catalog can help standardize service delivery and Research Director, improve service quality. Without a standard catalog of requestable services, each AMR Research, Inc., request from the business is treated like a unique deliverable - achieving consistent "Improving Business service levels and continuous process improvement becomes virtually impossible. and IT Alignment With a Service By guiding business users to order from a standard menu of services offered, the Catalog"IT organization can drive repeatability and predictability, which is the only way to improve quality and reduce costs.
Finally, the Service Catalog can in? uence and inform business users' consumption choices. Even if you don't actually charge services back to the business, the catalog can help them select the appropriate service by providing visibility into scope, cost, and service-level options. By publishing tiers of service and cost-performance trade-offs, IT can effectively "right-size" consumption, reduce over buying, and ... [download for more]
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