As an executive, you can create and track internal SLAs effectively allowing you to find bottlenecks in production. Further, service catalogs are especially useful if your business is providing these IT services to outside customers, or you need to create internal SLAs for business-critical processes and hardware. Any IT team and organization as a whole would benefit from the use of an IT services catalog.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM is the gold-standard resource helping you understand the strengths of major ITSM software vendors, insights into platform capabilities, integration opportunities, and many other factors to determine which solution best fits your needs.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion. See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing blogs bmc. May 7, 4 minute read. Purpose of the Catalog An IT services catalog serves multiple purposes for each group involved. Management How do companies manage the complexity of IT today, making sure businesses are streamlining?
Download now. You may also like. View all posts. As your service catalog kicks into operation, your service desk will churn out a substantial amount of data. Very often service desk managers give in to the desire to analyze this data using numerous metrics, many of which do not provide any actionable insights.
Here's a simple rule of thumb to determine whether a metric is useful or not:. Pay attention to only those metrics that fit the above criteria, and act upon the insights gleaned from them.
A service catalog evolves continuously with changing business and customer needs. To ensure your service catalog keeps up, you need to undertake improvements with these metrics as your compass. Now that you have decided to implement a service catalog, the next step is to identify the right software for your organization's needs. A service catalog's ultimate goal is to provide a user-friendly gateway to access and request services.
The software you choose should have powerful automation capabilities and should not be too complicated to implement or operate.
Gartner predicts that by , 90 percent of organizations will invest in an ITSM tool without first factoring in their organization's maturity. Failing to consider their maturity leads to organizations opting for tools that raise costs and fail to deliver the intended ROI. Organizations should, therefore, determine their organizational maturity and select an ITSM tool that matches their own maturity level or is flexible enough to work across organizations of varying maturity.
Here are a few key capabilities to look for in a service catalog tool, including feature checklists to follow:. Services provided to end users are composed of components such as networks, hardware, operating systems, and applications. A service catalog, therefore, needs to be tied to the CMDB to provision such services to end users and report on the performance of these individual components as a combined service offering.
To meet their reporting needs, service desk teams rely on the data drawn from incident, problem, and change management. It's easy to see how besides being a functional repository of services, a service catalog can turn into an assessment tool for an organization's components and services. All service desks regularly handle personally identifiable information PII such as email addresses and phone numbers.
This contact information is essential in the context of service requests for employee onboarding, asset provisioning, and even password resets. In the previous sections, we discussed key metrics that help you assess the effectiveness of your service catalog strategy.
To drill down through loads of data, a service catalog tool needs to have comprehensive, out-of-the-box reporting. Effective communication with stakeholders is one of the prerequisites of a successful service catalog. Ensure that your service catalog tool is equipped with the communication capabilities listed below. The above features help to keep all stakeholders in the loop and streamline your communication processes.
While we indeed started by defining an "IT" service catalog, digital transformation has permeated across all enterprise business functions.
Proven ITSM principles are now being increasingly applied to other business departments such as facilities, HR, and finance, giving rise to enterprise service management ESM. In this day and age, a service catalog tool should be future-proof by incorporating ESM capabilities; one example is an integrated self-service portal for different departments' service catalogs.
Be sure to undertake a detailed assessment of the ROI your organization will receive from implementing an ESM-ready service catalog tool, and proceed only after your organization has implemented a full-fledged IT service catalog. The above report by Gartner showcases how conversational assistants are reshaping the way people interact with technology. Powered by artificial intelligence AI , chatbots boost service desk efficiency and help technicians deflect tickets and shift their focus to business-critical functions.
Automation capabilities currently offered by most ITSM solutions are static in nature and only help to define rules for specific scenarios. Chatbots, on the other hand, leverage machine learning ML , so after feeding on historic data, they can recognize patterns in the ways a service desk deals with incoming tickets. A service catalog is a great tool for organizing and delivering services seamlessly while aligning your organization's services with business goals.
However, many organizations' service catalog initiatives fall flat or fail to deliver the expected ROI due to some avoidable pitfalls. The most common mistake organizations make is defining their service catalog in technology terms instead of business terms.
Avoid technical jargon when defining the service attributes to make it easier for end users to view and request services. While categorizing all the services offered by the IT department, take care to avoid very granular categorization, as this may end up making it difficult for end users to search for services and request them.
Catalog hierarchies should be concise so that the addition of new service items doesn't create deeply nested categories. Requesters expect visibility into the request fulfillment process. Many organizations don't let requesters know the status of their tickets, resulting in repeated calls or emails, or even duplicate tickets.
Ensure that your IT service desk is in constant communication with the end user throughout the life cycle of their service request. Failing to organize the catalog around end-user expectations and business goals is one of the reasons many service catalog initiatives fail. IT departments should not follow the inside-out approach of defining services based on their own assumptions.
Instead, they need to understand how they can facilitate business outcomes using IT's resources. In this section, we'll cover common IT terminologies that organizations often confuse with the service catalog.
An IT service catalog and a self-service portal are deeply entwined together, and are quite often misunderstood as referring to the same thing. A service catalog, as defined in the beginning of this guide, is a database of all IT services offered by an organization. A self-service portal is a transactional tool that connects the end user and the IT department. It provides an interface for raising various types of tickets and browsing the knowledge base for self-help articles.
A service catalog becomes actionable when integrated with the service portal, i. For example, an end user could log on to their self-service portal to perform a wide variety of actions. Some of them are:. In short, the self-service portal connects an organization's end users to the IT service catalog.
NOTE: A service catalog can also be independent of the self-service portal, but as we discussed in the best practices section, a service catalog delivers the greatest value when integrated with other ITIL processes. To differentiate between a service catalog and a product catalog, it is essential to understand what we mean by a "service" and a "product. A simpler explanation could be provided with an example.
A printer is a product, while granting someone access to the printing services on a particular floor is a service. Services are built on top of products in any IT organization. The target audience of a product catalog and a service catalog also varies. End users in an organization are generally the target audience for a service catalog, while other businesses are the target audience of an organization's product catalog.
Let's clear that up by breaking down the concepts of a CMDB. Data stored in the CMDB include hardware and software attributes, documentation, personnel, and relationships. Example: Let's consider an employee who needs to be granted access to their company's Wi-Fi network. The service catalog and the CMDB are locked together in a symbiotic state, where each feeds the other specific data that help each other's operations.
We discussed the two views of a service catalog very briefly in the previous sections. Let's now dive deeper. Some ITSM experts prefer to call the two views the business service catalog and the technical service catalog. However, this phrasing is troublesome since it conveys that the views are two distinct catalogs. On the contrary, these views are just two different perspectives of the same service catalog. Let's break down the differences between the two. As you can see, the technical service view helps technicians support the delivery of the services offered in the business service view.
This is how the two views interact with each other and help IT drive efficiency and attain business goals. Regardless of industry, organizations around the world have come to rely on digital solutions offered by IT for most aspects of their business. The IT department is no longer just a pitstop for employees, but a key driver in any organization's race to achieve positive business outcomes.
An IT service catalog acts as an important bridge connecting the IT department and end users, enabling efficient and satisfactory service delivery.
Implementing a service catalog that is user-friendly, scalable, and future-proof is crucial if an organization intends to derive the maximum benefits from it. The end user's view of the service catalog, where service offerings are communicated in business terms.
A website where an end user can access self-help articles or perform other actions, such as reporting an incident or requesting a service. A centralized database of all active service offerings delivered by an organization's IT department. An agreement between the service provider and the consumer establishing service levels and escalation mechanisms for violations of the agreed service levels. A formal request submitted by an end user to the IT service desk for initiating a service action.
The IT technician's view of the service catalog, with underlying processes communicated in technical terms. Zoho Corp. MENU Home. Not all users should necessarily be allowed to access all of your services. You can limit some items so that only certain users can access them. This central collection of services is a major point of contact between your business and the end-user. It is also a necessary addition to make sure that your services are managed effectively.
Each service catalogue is different, with each business presenting something new. However, certain steps and guidelines should always be taken to ensure best practice. Following this basic template idea and steps can be beneficial to all kinds of industries and sectors when putting together an IT service catalogue. Ashley is obsessed with words, Chinese food and all things tech.
Best access control Miami. Study: Diversity in the Workplace. Identity Access Management Tools. We use cookies to enhance your experience and for marketing purposes. Read more. IT Service Catalogue Templates. March 16, Understanding the IT Service Catalogue This centralized list of IT services can be arranged in two different perspectives: the customer view and the technical view. In their goal of moving towards a user-centric IT, IT teams build an IT service catalog for their end users to request a service which is very similar to their online shopping experience.
With an IT service catalog, IT teams can:. The IT service catalog functionality in ServiceDesk Plus has custom templates, automatic assignment of SLAs, code free automations and workflows, and a multi-stage approval process to enable IT help desk teams cover the whole nine yards of request management.
Define authorization, escalation, and notification policies Approval details, notification rules. With IT services offered as catalog options right in the end user self-service portal, we were able to present a consistent and structured view of IT's request management capabilities completely automated with SLAs and approval workflows.
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