Five Ways a Service Catalog Enhances Business Value

The service catalog is an invaluable resource because it serves a crucial role as the single access point to all products and services offered by IT and other departments.

Sounds good, right? It is...when it's working well and you can easily find what you need, are able to submit a requests with ease and receive exactly what you want, when you want it. But, when services are difficult to find, outdated, or not available at all – you can’t do your job properly and your frustration multiplies exponentially.

That’s why a well-designed and functioning service catalog is one of the unsung heroes of IT service management. The service catalog is the central source of trusted and consistent information on all the agreed-upon services that IT delivers and supports. Therefore, it’s crucial to design, build, and maintain an accurate service catalog that will improve service delivery.

Managed effectively, the service catalog can help your organization streamline services, improve productivity, and lower costs.  Here are five ways a fully optimized service catalog can enhance your organization’s business value:

  1. The service catalog articulates the organization’s guiding principles as well as the details of what, how, and to whom services are delivered. As the single portal for requests and provisioning, the service catalog enables more streamlined communication that can save time for all involved.
  2. When designing or redesigning a service catalog, it is essential to talk to customers and stakeholders to understand what is important to them and what they value most. This helps to develop and nurture positive relationships between business units and IT, which builds trust – and ensures the correct services are delivered.
  3. The service catalog can help measure performance by clearly defining what each service provides, identify its components and the resources underpinning the service, and ascertain the costs associated with provisioning each service – as well as how well it performs.
  4. A well-designed service catalog optimizes the redesign, restructuring, and retiring of services. This expedites service standardization, workflow management, process automation, a controlled consumption of services, and much more.
  5. The service catalog provides essential information about the cost and quality of existing as well as anticipated future services, which can facilitate business forecasting and budget planning.

The service catalog is a dynamic repository that spans across the entire organization and ensures the right services are available at the right time for the right cost – so that IT can facilitate the outcomes their customers and stakeholders want to achieve.

To learn more about this business-centric tool and its positive impact on your organization’s bottom line, register for the IT industry’s first – and only – Service Catalog Specialist certification course.

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