ITIL defines two different perspectives on the service catalog, which in practice can be two separate initiatives:
- The Business Service Catalog ~ Services Delivered to Customers
- Technical Service Catalog ~ The IT components necessary to support the provision of services to the customer but should not be part of the customer view.
PMG's solution focuses more heavily on the "Business Service Catalog." Why? It provides higher value and cost savings to the organization as a whole. A Technical Service Catalog might be valuable to the shared service organization (your department), but not to the customer base. An analogy: the Business Service Catalog is the Amazon.com web-store that all users will visit and use, the Technical Service Catalog contains the Blueprints and architectural drawings and documentation of the web site. Users don't care how the site works or how it was built; they just use it and interact with it.
The Business Service Catalog contains services that customers need and use as seen from their perspective. It should not be confused with a configuration management database (CMDB), though they should integrate. A view of the CMDB may constitute a Technical Service Catalog.
Where to Start? Business or Technical Service Catalog?
Depending on which function of your team owns the initiative typically dictates where the Service Catalog journey begins. If you are an IT group and an IT Operations group begins the Service Catalog journey, it frequently embarks on a Technical Service Catalog and begins to define technical services such as E-mail, application hosting, data backup and recovery, etc.
On the other hand, if the Customer Service or Help Desk group begins the initiative, it tends to define more direct user-impacting services like password resets, access to fileshares, new hardware and software requests. Who is right, where to you start? Clearly there is value to both, but not equal value in the eyes of the organization or to management.
There are very different cost factors and value propositions to both. It is common knowledge that the Help Desk is seen as a cost center and is often first to be outsourced. Infrastructure support follows closely behind and is more and more considered a commodity service. Flipping this perception is precisely the problem a Service Catalog should address.
Case Study:
Case Study: