- Organizations often don’t understand which technical services affect user-facing services.
- Organizations lack clarity around ownership of responsibilities for service delivery.
- Organizations are vulnerable to change-related incidents when they don’t have insight into service dependencies and their business impact.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Even IT professionals underestimate the effort and the complexity of technical components required to deliver a service.
- Info-Tech’s methodology promotes service orientation among technical teams by highlighting how their work affects the value of user-facing services.
- CIOs can use the technical part of the catalog as a tool to articulate the value, dependencies, and constraints of services to business leaders.
Impact and Result
- Extend the user-facing service catalog to document the people, processes, and technology required to deliver user-facing services.
- Bring transparency to how services are delivered to better articulate IT’s capabilities and strengthen IT-business alignment.
- Increase IT’s ability to assess the impact of changes, make informed decisions, and mitigate change-related risks.
- Respond to incidents and problems in the IT environment with more agility due to reduced diagnosis time for issues.
Create an IT View of the Service Catalog Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build the technical components of your service catalog, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Create an IT View of the Service Catalog – Phases 1-4
1. Launch the project
Build a strong foundation for the project to increase the chances of success.
- Create an IT View of the Service Catalog – Phase 1: Launch the Project
- Service Catalog Extension Project Charter
- Service Catalog Extension Training Deck
2. Identify service-specific technologies
Identify which technologies are specific to certain services.
- Create an IT View of the Service Catalog – Phase 2: Identify Service-Specific Technology
- IT Service Catalog
3. Identify underpinning technologies
Determine which technologies underpin the existence of user-facing services.
- Create an IT View of the Service Catalog – Phase 3: Identify Underpinning Services
4. Map the people and processes to the technologies they support
Document the roles and responsibilities required to deliver each user-facing service.
- Create an IT View of the Service Catalog – Phase 4: Determine People & Process
- Service Definitions: Visual Representations
Workshop: Create an IT View of the Service Catalog
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Launch the Project
The Purpose
Build a foundation to kick off the project.
Key Benefits Achieved
A carefully selected team of project participants.
Identified stakeholders and metrics.
Activities
1.1 Create a communication plan
1.2 Complete the training deck
Outputs
Project charter
Understanding of the process used to complete the definitions
2 Identify Service-Specific Technologies and Underpinning Technologies
The Purpose
Determine the technologies that support the user-facing services.
Key Benefits Achieved
Understanding of what is required to run a service.
Activities
2.1 Determine service-specific technology categories
2.2 Identify service-specific technologies
2.3 Determine underpinning technologies
Outputs
Logical buckets of service-specific technologies makes it easier to identify them
Identified technologies
Identified underpinning services and technologies
3 Identify People and Processes
The Purpose
Discover the roles and responsibilities required to deliver each user-facing service.
Key Benefits Achieved
Understanding of what is required to deliver each user-facing service.
Activities
3.1 Determine roles required to deliver services based on organizational structure
3.2 Document the services
Outputs
Mapped responsibilities to each user-facing service
Completed service definition visuals
4 Complete the Service Definition Chart and Visual Diagrams
The Purpose
Create a central hub (database) of all the technical components required to deliver a service.
Key Benefits Achieved
Single source of information where IT can see what is required to deliver each service.
Ability to leverage the extended catalog to benefit the organization.
Activities
4.1 Document all the previous steps in the service definition chart and visual diagrams
4.2 Review service definition with team and subject matter experts
Outputs
Completed service definition visual diagrams and completed catalog