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The primary purpose of a Service Catalog is to communicate how IT can help internal business customers and end users do their jobs. A successful Service Catalog helps the business understand the value that IT delivers – answering the questions, “What does IT do?”, and “How well does IT do it?” And by mapping IT services more explicitly to business needs, the IT organization can better understand how to add even more value. This aspect of the Service Catalog helps address three of the most emotional words in the IT vocabulary: “IT-Business Alignment.” The Service Portfolio Catalog can also provide a vehicle to realistically set – and meet – business expectations. One of the common complaints we hear is that IT never meets its deadlines. You may think you’re delivering what the business wants, when they want it. But without a Service Portfolio to clearly articulate what will be delivered and when, at what price and what service level, your internal customers’ expectations are likely to be very different than you think they are.
In addition, a Service Request Catalog can help standardize service delivery and improve service quality. Without a standard catalog of requestable services, each request from the business is treated like a unique deliverable – achieving consistent service levels and continuous process improvement becomes virtually impossible. By guiding business users to order from a standard menu of services offered, the IT organization can drive repeatability and predictability, which is the only way to improve quality and reduce costs.
Finally, the Service Catalog can infl 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 control demand.
The end result of a successful catalog of standardized IT services is measurable and dramatic. Among other benefi ts, I regularly see:
- A 30 percent reduction in the operational cost of delivering IT services;
- 50 percent faster cycle time for the fulfi llment of services;
- Better allocation of resources to effectively meet business demand; and
- Most importantly, signifi cant improvements in internal customer satisfaction.
Clearly, if you are implementing ITIL – or any service-based framework – the Service Catalog should be at the top of your to-do list. Now let’s take a look at the top four pitfalls to avoid in your Service Catalog project.
Four Common Service Catalog Mistakes
Pitfall #1: Assume your customer understands what you’re talking about… A common mistake with many Service Catalog initiatives is defining services in technology terms, with service levels based on the metrics that are easiest for IT to track. We call this the inside-out approach and it almost always fails. Successful Service Catalog projects start by asking users and business stakeholders what they want and what’s important to them, and building the catalog around those success factors. This is the outside-in approach.
The problem is that while IT tends to be organized around technical, skill-based or asset-based silos, business users think in business outcomes. So while IT’s customers may be thinking about on-boarding new employees or their order-to-cash process, IT is talking about their change management process or distributed computing. If you package and communicate your services and metrics with a focus on business- relevant deliverables, rather than the underlying technologies and technical service levels, you’ve overcome one of the greatest barriers to success.
Pitfall # 2: If you document the Service Catalog, they will come... Recently, I spent time with the IT infrastructure group of a large corporation that had spent two years implementing ITIL. They sent their entire team to ITIL training; they dutifully documented their processes and cataloged their services. But nothing changed in their interactions with business users. Despite having a list of IT services readily accessible on the corporate intranet, business users didn’t seem to want to refer to it.
The problem was that their Service Portfolio Catalog was merely a static reference document. End users could go to it to read about IT services, but they needed to link to another form or call the help desk to submit a request.
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