Manage Service Catalogs

The challenge

• Your business users may not be aware of the full scope of your services.
• Typically service information is written in technical jargon. For business users, this means that the information will be tough to understand.
• Without a service catalog, you have no agreement o what is available, so business will assume that everything is.

Our advice

Insight

• Define your services from a user's or customer perspective.
  • When your service catalog contains too much information that does not apply to most users, they will not use it.
• Separate the line-of-business services from enterprise services. It simplifies your documentation process and makes the service catalog more comfortable to use.

Impact and results 

• Our approach helps you organize your service catalog in a business-friendly way while keeping it manageable for IT.
• And manageable also means that your service catalog remains a living document. You can update your service records easily.
• Your service catalog forms a visible bridge between IT and the business. Improve IT's perception by communicating the benefits of the service catalog.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Get started

Our concise executive brief shows you why building a service catalog is a good idea for your company. We'll show you our methodology and the ways we can help you in handling this.

Minimize the risks from attrition through an effective knowledge transfer process.

• Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Executive Brief (ppt)

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• Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phases 1-4 (ppt)

Launch the initiative

Our launch phase will walk you through the charter template, build help a balanced team, create your change message and communication plan to obtain buy-in from all your organization's stakeholders.

• Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 1: Launch the Project (ppt)
• Service Catalog Project Charter (doc)

Identify and define the enterprise services

Group enterprise services which you offer to everyone in the company, logically together.

• Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 2: Identify and Define Enterprise Services (ppt)
• Sample Enterprise Services (ppt)

Identify and define your line-of-business (LOB) services

These services apply only to one business line. Other business users should not see them in the catalog.

• Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 3: Identify and Define Line of Business Services (ppt)
• Sample LOB Services – Industry Specific (ppt)
• Sample LOB Services – Functional Group (ppt)

Complete your services definition chart

Complete this chart to allow the business to pick what services to include in the service catalog. It also allows you to extend the catalog with technical services by including IT-facing services. Of course, separated-out only for IT.

• Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 4: Complete Service Definitions (ppt)
• Services Definition Chart (xls)