This lack of a framework for the creation, modification, and ongoing management of SLAs between IT departments and their customers is not surprising, especially in light of the fact that these SLAs were usually offered without the necessary IT service catalog.

That is like asking someone to sign a contract to buy an expensive vehicle without first having them shop in the showroom. It is little wonder so many SLA initiatives stall or, at best, garner only lukewarm customer interest.

Since IT departments have not given up the struggle to achieve customer satisfaction, they are back at the table with the concept of an IT service catalog, an important aspect of ITIL’s (IT Infrastructure Library) best-practices. IT service catalogs enable internal IT departments to provide Amazon.com-like services to their customers with an interactive portfolio of IT products and services for "purchase." Some analysts have coined the term "demand management" for this attempt to understand, influence, and satisfy the needs of the IT customer and the vehicle they use is the IT service catalog.

Building the Catalog

There are a wide variety of techniques advocated in the industry to help construct an IT service catalog. Differences stem from vendor software capabilities, consulting approaches, and customer culture. Most advocate some form of internal marketing as a means of interacting with IT customers. Each adds something new to the overall methodology on creating a functional, productive, and compelling IT service catalog.

The following is a list of articles which describe techniques for this process of data collection, analysis, software configuration, communication, and publication:

Constructing a service catalog can be a difficult chore from the perspective of IT as it may be integrated with the configuration management database (CMDB), the external marketing product catalog, or the overall internal business services catalog (see the sidebars below for more information on each of these touch points).

Each of these integration efforts requires technical work—not to mention the need to configure and deploy the service catalog software itself. IT departments can possibly be forgiven, therefore, for losing sight of the critical task of accommodating the needs of their end users when ordering from the service catalog. But forget they do, and the results can damage and often destroy the possibility for a successful rollout.

To make matters worse, the implementation approaches discussed in this article all address the need to solicit business concerns, issues, and perspectives but they do not indicate how the user should interact with the service catalog once it’s in use; a key factor in successful adoption.

Service or Item?

Because the service catalog is a relatively new concept for which there is little in the way of definitive guidance, it is perhaps not surprising that many do not fully appreciate its structure. One of the most common mistakes made early in implementations is to confuse the concept of an IT service with that of an IT service item.

An IT service is the category name placed on a logical grouping of various activities an IT department performs on behalf of its customers. Examples of IT services might be messaging, data services, telecommunications, data protection, or remote connectivity. Each of these implies a set of hardware, software and people which combine to deliver a number of related offerings.

Sometimes, it is required to break down these categories further. For example, data services might be further sub-divided into data reporting, data integration, data refresh, and data transfer services. Organizations are increasingly confronting the legacy of mediocre service level agreements (SLA), which are usually developed and deployed in the absence of an overarching service level management (SLM) process.

This lack of a framework for the creation, modification, and ongoing management of SLAs between IT departments and their customers is not surprising, especially in light of the fact that these SLAs were usually offered without the necessary IT service catalog.

That is like asking someone to sign a contract to buy an expensive vehicle without first having them shop in the showroom. It is little wonder so many SLA initiatives stall or, at best, garner only lukewarm customer interest.

Since IT departments have not given up the struggle to achieve customer satisfaction, they are back at the table with the concept of an IT service catalog, an important aspect of ITIL’s (IT Infrastructure Library) best-practices. IT service catalogs enable internal IT departments to provide Amazon.com-like services to their customers with an interactive portfolio of IT products and services for "purchase." Some analysts have coined the term "demand management" for this attempt to understand, influence, and satisfy the needs of the IT customer and the vehicle they use is the IT service catalog.

Building the Catalog

There are a wide variety of techniques advocated in the industry to help construct an IT service catalog. Differences stem from vendor software capabilities, consulting approaches, and customer culture. Most advocate some form of internal marketing as a means of interacting with IT customers. Each adds something new to the overall methodology on creating a functional, productive, and compelling IT service catalog.

The following is a list of articles which describe techniques for this process of data collection, analysis, software configuration, communication, and publication:

Constructing a service catalog can be a difficult chore from the perspective of IT as it may be integrated with the configuration management database (CMDB), the external marketing product catalog, or the overall internal business services catalog (see the sidebars below for more information on each of these touch points).

Each of these integration efforts requires technical work—not to mention the need to configure and deploy the service catalog software itself. IT departments can possibly be forgiven, therefore, for losing sight of the critical task of accommodating the needs of their end users when ordering from the service catalog. But forget they do, and the results can damage and often destroy the possibility for a successful rollout.

To make matters worse, the implementation approaches discussed in this article all address the need to solicit business concerns, issues, and perspectives but they do not indicate how the user should interact with the service catalog once it’s in use; a key factor in successful adoption.

Service or Item?

Because the service catalog is a relatively new concept for which there is little in the way of definitive guidance, it is perhaps not surprising that many do not fully appreciate its structure. One of the most common mistakes made early in implementations is to confuse the concept of an IT service with that of an IT service item.

An IT service is the category name placed on a logical grouping of various activities an IT department performs on behalf of its customers. Examples of IT services might be messaging, data services, telecommunications, data protection, or remote connectivity. Each of these implies a set of hardware, software and people which combine to deliver a number of related offerings.

Sometimes, it is required to break down these categories further. For example, data services might be further sub-divided into data reporting, data integration, data refresh, and data transfer services.
Organizations are increasingly confronting the legacy of mediocre service level agreements (SLA), which are usually developed and deployed in the absence of an overarching service level management (SLM) process.

This lack of a framework for the creation, modification, and ongoing management of SLAs between IT departments and their customers is not surprising, especially in light of the fact that these SLAs were usually offered without the necessary IT service catalog.

That is like asking someone to sign a contract to buy an expensive vehicle without first having them shop in the showroom. It is little wonder so many SLA initiatives stall or, at best, garner only lukewarm customer interest.

Since IT departments have not given up the struggle to achieve customer satisfaction, they are back at the table with the concept of an IT service catalog, an important aspect of ITIL’s (IT Infrastructure Library) best-practices. IT service catalogs enable internal IT departments to provide Amazon.com-like services to their customers with an interactive portfolio of IT products and services for "purchase." Some analysts have coined the term "demand management" for this attempt to understand, influence, and satisfy the needs of the IT customer and the vehicle they use is the IT service catalog.

Building the Catalog

There are a wide variety of techniques advocated in the industry to help construct an IT service catalog. Differences stem from vendor software capabilities, consulting approaches, and customer culture. Most advocate some form of internal marketing as a means of interacting with IT customers. Each adds something new to the overall methodology on creating a functional, productive, and compelling IT service catalog.

The following is a list of articles which describe techniques for this process of data collection, analysis, software configuration, communication, and publication:

Constructing a service catalog can be a difficult chore from the perspective of IT as it may be integrated with the configuration management database (CMDB), the external marketing product catalog, or the overall internal business services catalog (see the sidebars below for more information on each of these touch points).

Each of these integration efforts requires technical work—not to mention the need to configure and deploy the service catalog software itself. IT departments can possibly be forgiven, therefore, for losing sight of the critical task of accommodating the needs of their end users when ordering from the service catalog. But forget they do, and the results can damage and often destroy the possibility for a successful rollout.

To make matters worse, the implementation approaches discussed in this article all address the need to solicit business concerns, issues, and perspectives but they do not indicate how the user should interact with the service catalog once it’s in use; a key factor in successful adoption.

Service or Item?

Because the service catalog is a relatively new concept for which there is little in the way of definitive guidance, it is perhaps not surprising that many do not fully appreciate its structure. One of the most common mistakes made early in implementations is to confuse the concept of an IT service with that of an IT service item.

An IT service is the category name placed on a logical grouping of various activities an IT department performs on behalf of its customers. Examples of IT services might be messaging, data services, telecommunications, data protection, or remote connectivity. Each of these implies a set of hardware, software and people which combine to deliver a number of related offerings.

Sometimes, it is required to break down these categories further. For example, data services might be further sub-divided into data reporting, data integration, data refresh, and data transfer services.
An IT service item, however, is more akin to a specific offering. It is literally what the customer actually orders. For instance, under the IT service category of Telecommunications and the sub-category of Voice, one might find the following IT service items:

The critical distinction between the IT service item and the overall IT service is end users interact and, more importantly, only think of the former. The category labels of the latter are usually too abstract for the user and sometimes they become so confusingly non-descriptive, that users are unable to find the item or service they want to order.

That is the reason that savvy service catalog implementation teams ensure the labels they derive for each service name are worded in the lingua franca of the user, not in IT-speak.

Successful Implementations

Despite the challenge, the stories of successful service catalog deployments are starting to accumulate. Robert Hilsdon, IT Service manager for Rohm and Haas, a Philadelphia-based maker of chemicals, adhesives, and sealants, conceived, managed, and oversaw successful implementation of his company’s IT service catalog.

Rohm deployed RequestCenter software from Foster City, California-based newScale. Since going live in May of 2006, the catalog has grown to over 220 service items rolled out to 8,000 end users in 35 countries processing more than 200,000 requests over the past year. Each service item is described in plain English from with no IT jargon, and presented to IT customers via a Web browser in an easy-to-use interface.

It wasn’t always easy going, though. Hilsdon states that initially Rohm tried different approaches to constructing their IT service catalog, including modifying pre-existing IT service document templates, collecting info using a service-specific questionnaire, and assembling IT services from an asset database. Each of these approaches failed.

So they went back to the existing incident ticketing software to examine all possible routings for the fulfillment of individual service items and used this as the basis of their existing, de-facto service design. From this reservoir of data, they developed service level requirements from a set of rationalized activities.

In addition to the service items specific to their end users, Rohm and Haas also satisfied the services needs of their own IT organization with 15 more technical IT service items such as "UNIX Build," which describes an end-to-end solution for services requested by IT staff.

Hilsdon noted that, “these services include high-level containers for bundles of other, even more technical services. For instance, the service item ‘Application Development’ incorporates desktop rollout of a new version to a full-blown deployment of a custom-coded application and all the accompanying data center modifications and changes, which might involve as many as five separate technical services.”

One key aspect of Rohm's deployment was the integration of the service catalog into the corporate LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) server. This enables their newScale service catalog to use authentication groups to assigned visibility to ensure that each end user only sees the IT services that they are entitled to. It also provides information about the user (e.g. routing, approvals, geography) that directly impacts the workflow for the requested IT service item.

Enabling Strategy

Ron Williams, manager of Data Services, of CompuCredit Corporation in Atlanta knew that he needed to improve IT’s marketability. Williams notes that, “when you try to run IT like a business you need a marketing function to help educate prospects and customers, shape demand, and publicize successes.”
In most IT shops, this function is needed, though oftentimes ignored. Williams added further, “We are trying to master the customer-facing skills that come second-nature to marketers. This helps us better communicate our services, skills, and plans for the future to our customers who have not typically been aware of what we were doing or realized its impact on them.

"Our goal is for our customer community to able to be aware of our capabilities as well as limitations so that they help us evaluate the tradeoffs we face in delivering IT services: both current ones and those desired for the future. The IT service catalog is our metaphor for doing just that.”

The way in which the IT customer thinks about and interacts with these IT service items is the key consideration when deploying a service catalog user interface. CompuCredit chose service catalog, a software offering from PMG, in Atlanta. Williams stated that, “the reason we bought PMG was that IT’s mission was to fulfill our customer’s requirements. They were paying the bill, not us. They liked the intuitive and recognizable user interface which worked using the shopping cart paradigm and put the user community at ease when trying to understand the concept behind an IT service catalog. It was their input on the purchase decision that made the difference.”

In addition to the Amazon-like ordering approach, many organizations seek other means to educate and communicate with their customer; examples include workflow visuals with automatic status updates when a service item passes from one interim state to another and other self-help features such as queue management, automated escalation, accountability of response/action, and time-driven metrics.

Williams notes: “Our customers had their own responsibilities for interim states in workflow. For instance, they need to perform a ‘Blackberry pickup’ step when notification goes out that it is ready. The transaction will remain in this state until the customer has signed for the item."

By deploying an service catalog that grows over time to encompass all activities of value to the customer, IT can eliminate those activities not specifically adding value to the end user or that cause concern.

Williams also explained that, “our vision was to deploy a fully-instrumented IT/business service with 100% transparency. When bad things happen, and they do, customers will begin to get suspicious if you do not disclose all the reasons why and retain the history of each failure for all to see. For this reason, wherever we can increase transparency we try to do so. In this way, facts, not rumors, can flow through the IT-oriented conversations of IT consumers when they gather around the corporate water cooler.”

One obstacle organizations find in their ability to sell the IT service catalog concept effectively is the need for visual and interactive tracking for each order.

Selling the Catalog

As with any major project, the sponsoring department needs to sell it to the community of stakeholders. This requirement applies with extreme prejudice to the service catalog. Hilsdon notes that “We employed a variety of marketing techniques to sell the IT service catalog to users who started out mostly in the dark. We gathered them in groups with train-the-trainer events. This had some success but did not achieve the results we wanted. We created an ongoing response team that sifts through user comments and feedback and plows them back into the offering. They took the lead in refreshing our front-end, which will soon boast more intuitive names of services items. One example of this re-classification is that we will now refer to ‘Printing Problems’ instead of ‘Bad Print Driver’.”
One of the driving obstacles to adoption of a service catalog is the residue of distrust which can exist between the IT department and its customers. Therefore, as part of a deployment, many organizations are choosing to add features to their catalogs that help restore trust as well as establish a new set of expectations for the IT-customer relationship.

These features help demonstrate the value of IT more than any presentation, e-mail, or publicity stunt. Williams noted “That degree of proactivity goes a long way to establishing IT’s permanent value proposition in a new customer’s eyes.”

Some of this customer-centric functionality includes:

According to Hilsdon, “Our goal was to make it as easy to use and customer-focused as possible. IT services are clearly defined, and there’s a shopping cart for ordering services, providing a familiar interface based on online retail catalogs.” The result? Once this approach started the take root, the “users got excited and saw that we were really making a difference”.

Rohm has seen IT customer satisfaction increase steadily since going live with their offering. After having been stuck at a 3.5 out of 4.0 scale, they recently reached their benchmark target of a 3.8 satisfaction rating with end users. And with the adoption of a self-service model for ordering IT services, the number of calls to their help desk has been reduced by more than 40% resulting in lower IT support costs.

The Catalog and the Service Desk

Rohm captures all of internal customers’ requests for IT services through their service catalog as a single point of contact. This includes requests for new computers and security access, new project requests, and application enhancements. Hilsdon noted that Rohm “established a central intake process that encompasses all IT work, from examining SAP requirements to provisioning cables, such that virtually everything done by IT is reflected in some sort of service listed in the catalog.”

This role of the catalog usually requires integration with the service desk (ITIL’s single point of contact to the IT customer) and other back-end fulfillment systems. Whereas incidents inbound to the service desk use the CMDB as their source for information, the inbound Service requests use the IT service catalog.

“Our service catalog had to be more than just a Web front end to the help desk," said Hilsdon. We needed it to be the one intake mechanism for all the work we do for the business. By managing all IT requests through this one point of interaction, we can improve end-to-end visibility, for everything from large development projects to day-to-day services.”

From a demand management standpoint, this approach provides more control over the demand for IT services and helps ensure the IT budget is focused on the right priorities for the business.

Hilsdon said that, once this "demand-to-delivery" approach started the take root, the users got excited and saw they were making a difference. The work is still challenging. In fact, Hilsdon indicated that Rohm and Haas maintains separate teams that work on process design, metrics, and catalog design.

Conclusion

IT service catalogs and the larger and related discipline of Demand Management are rapidly becoming the hot topic of IT-specific process improvement. With the demand by the business for improved IT service delivery and IT’s constant challenge of communicating effectively with its customers, the advent and adoption of IT service catalog has arrived none-to-soon.

For those organizations who have implemented service level agreements (SLAs) or their kissing cousins operating level agreements (OLAs) and still have not yielded the value in terms of improved customer satisfaction and better service delivery, the piece missing may very well be a compelling IT service catalog.