A Service Catalogue is one of the most powerful and visible tools available to an IT department and should support its work in many ways.
Troy DeMoulin is Pink Elephant Canada’s VP in Research and Development and, many years ago, wrote a popular blog post entitled IT Service Catalog Examples. Fifteen years later, Troy has now updated this post, calling it: The Service Catalog Is the Central Pillar of an IT Service Organisation.
In it, Troy, a respected trainer, shares a recent discussion he had with a class on Integrated Service Management. The talking point was on the evolution of an IT organisation’s culture and customer engagement approach, and the discussion of the latter centred around how it has moved from a technology life cycle or asset mindset to one focused on holistic products and services that support customer outcomes. During this discussion, one of the students came up with what Troy described as a “very bold statement”:
“It seems to me that an organisation’s successful adoption of a service management model is dependent upon and linked to the maturity of their service catalogue or its existence.”
Troy at first countered this argument – primarily for those students whose companies had yet to adopt and deploy a service catalogue – by suggesting several areas of improvement that could be addressed without such a dependency. He cited practices such as Incident Management, Asset Management, Problem Management and Change Enablement to prove his point. However, after the class, Troy “reflected on the student’s comment” and “had to acknowledge its accuracy”.
In this updated blog entry, Troy writes that many of the best practices regarded as critical to IT service management rely on the internal service organisation itself identifying as a customer-facing service organisation, and that it can describe its value proposition related to the products and services it provides to its customers. This means, Troy continues, that the discussion moves beyond technology optimisation to one focused on customer mission goals, and how the IT service organisation best supports those goals through services supported by systemic products that are either managed on site or brokered through third-party providers.
Troy then asks us to consider critical practices with the keyword ‘service’ in their names, such as:
Or the following list:
Even though the practices in the second list do not contain the word ‘service’, IT practitioners are fully aware of the need to take a holistic or systemic view of these concepts as opposed to a narrow device or domain-based orientation.
Troy concludes that the wish of organisations to present themselves as strategic partners to their business partners requires them to speak the language of products and services. He adds that this is why his blog article from 15 years ago remains one of the most linked to and visited pages on the Pink Elephant website.
Finally, Troy shares a list of links to publicly available service catalogues, though stresses that not all are examples of best practices:
If you are on your own journey to develop your service catalogue, we highly recommend taking Pink Elephant EMEA’s Service Catalogue Specialist certification course coming out at the end of this year, as it’s a one-of-a-kind in the industry. During the course, you will learn how to define, create, implement, and manage the ongoing process associated with building and maintaining a service catalogue.
We also strongly encourage you to sign up for our newsletter, which will notify you as soon as this course is released
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