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Realizing that many organizations are finding difficulty with determining how best to approach ITIL, we have asked ourselves whether the implementation of a Service Catalog should be started early in the process of adoption, either in parallel or before the introduction of the CMDB as a means to overcome this hurdle. This approach would entail using the Service Catalog to first define what services are to be offered to IT’s business customers and the user community, and then integrating the Service Catalog with the CMDB so that each complements the other.
The core of this argument is based on the need to start from the perspective of a ‘Front Office’ for IT, where business customer needs drive the definition and delivery of IT services – rather than from the perspective of the ‘Back Office’ of systems, assets, and resources, currently and historically managed by IT. This is a fundamental shift that is needed to overcome the historic structures that have made the workings of IT impenetrable and indecipherable to its internal customers.
The case is based on four key propositions:
1. Unless business needs drive the definition of services and delivery of those services, there will continue to be a disconnect between IT and its internal customers. This is because building up service definitions from configuration items and available technology assets takes the same IT-centric view that has contributed to much of the communication problems inherent in IT’s relationship with the business, nor does it consider the lifecycle of provision and support needed to maintain and optimize the services supported. There is a strong case to say that the data model for a CMDB should be drawn from a Service Catalog, because that is how IT articulates what it does for its customers. Starting with a Service Catalog forces IT to review, define, and present what it offers from a customer’s view, and not from an infrastructure perspective.
2. The benefits of the Service Catalog will come much earlier in the adoption cycle than those for the CMDB, especially when considering the long time to completion of most CMDB projects. Starting with a customer-facing Service Catalog makes the most sense for an IT organization that wishes to increase its customer visibility and effectiveness. An actionable Service Catalog can be completed quickly, particularly if based on existing commercial software and templates that enshrine ‘best practices’, giving IT a quick and visible win. IT can then integrate the Service Catalog with a CMDB for complete service and configuration management.
3. A Service Catalog enables more customer-focused IT service management. The Service Catalog achieves this through offering clearly understood, consistent, standardized, and rationalized services and appropriate service levels with associated costs to both business unit managers and end users. This applies to both simple services such as the installation of a telephone, as well as complex services that may involve the use of multiple underlying services and resources over time, such as the provision of an order-management solution. The interactive nature of the Service Catalog and the feedback it can give to users regarding the status of requests or service performance to business unit managers, significantly enhances the opportunity to set and deliver against user expectations.
4. The Service Catalog will accelerate a CMDB deployment and improve operational efficiency. The Service Catalog will help define and capture the information required to populate the CMDB and present back information generated by changes to the CMDB in a manner that is intelligible by IT’s customers. An actionable Service Catalog improves efficiencies by eliminating the unnecessary back-and-forth clarification of services requested by users, multiple mechanisms to carry out the same processes, and unnecessary ‘shepherds’ who manually co-ordinate service request processes. The information gathered by the Service Catalog also enables better demand management, budgeting, and planning. And as an aid to benchmarking it should allow comparative analysis with industry standards, and thus enable better decisions to be taken on the value of outsourcing services, if appropriate.
Butler Group’s conclusion is that the deployment of a Service Catalog is an essential early step in the adoption of ITIL and one that is likely to deliver significant return on investment with relatively low risk—providing results in a much shorter timescale than one would achieve through implementing a CMDB in isolation..
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