The Service Catalog Is the Central Pillar of an IT Service Organization

Editor’s note: The following blog is an update Pink Elephant’s most popular blog post, IT Service Catalog Examples. Troy has now updated that blog – fifteen years later! Enjoy…

I would like to share a conversation I recently had with a class focused on Integrated Service Management. The class was discussing the evolution of an IT organization’s culture and customer engagement approach as it moved from a technology life cycle or asset mindset to one focused on holistic products and services that support customer outcomes. One of the students in the class made this very bold statement of dependency: 

“It seems to me that an organization’s successful adoption of a service management model is dependent upon and linked to the maturity of their service catalog or its existence.”

Wanting to provide some encouragement to those organizations in the class that had yet to adopt and deploy a service catalog, I said that while that may be true to some extent, there are serval areas of improvement that can be addressed without this dependency. I listed a few practices such as Incident Management, Asset Management, Problem Management, Change Enablement, etc. to prove my point. 

However, the more I reflected on the student’s comment, the more I had to acknowledge its accuracy. So many of the best practices that we discuss as critical to IT service management rely on the fact that the internal service organization itself identifies as a service organization and can describe its value proposition related to the products and services it provides to its customers. This means moving beyond a discussion focused on technology optimization to one focused on customer mission goals, and how the IT service organization best supports those goals through services supported by systemic products that are either managed on premise or brokered through third-party providers.

Consider critical practices such as:

• Service Request Management
• Service Validation and Testing
• Service Level Management
• Service Configuration Management
• Service Continuity Management 
• Service Financial Management

Each with the key word ‘service’ in the name or the following list:

• Availability Management
• Monitoring and Event Management
• Portfolio Management
• Architecture Management
• Information Security Management

While these practices do not specifically contain the word, service, IT practitioners fully understand the need to take a holistic or systemic view of these concepts as opposed a narrow device or domain-based orientation. 

So, yes, I must fully agree that much of we aspire to achieve and how we wish to present ourselves as strategic partners to our business partners requires our organization to speak the language of products and services.

This is the reason why many years ago I wrote an initial blog post to provide examples (IT Service Catalog Examples), and why it remains to this day one of the most linked and visited web page on Pink Elephant’s website.

Someone once shared with me that it is always easier to edit than to create from scratch. For this reason, I have for many years managed a collection of links to publicly available service catalogs for you to check out. Also, many other readers have added links to their own collections in the comments’ section of this blog which I encourage you to check out as well.

However, before you go on to navigate to the links in search of example service catalogs, I want to qualify that these links do not necessarily represent best practices. That being said, they do provide you with a glimpse of some real organizations that are kind enough to put their cookies on the table for all to sample:

• UC Davis ServiceHub (Portal)
• University of California at Santa Cruz
• State of North Carolina
• University of New South Wales
• DCU
• Purdue
• University Kentucky Commonwealth
• National Institute of Health
• Stanford University
• Clemson University
• The Ohio State University
• The University of Texas
• MIT Information Services
• Cornell University
• State of Maine
• University Arizona 
• New Mexico Dept. of IT
• University of Alaska

Another great site for service catalog examples is HEIT Management. I trust that you will find these sites useful.

If you are on your own journey to develop your service catalog, I highly recommend taking our Service Catalog Specialist certification course. It's the only one of its kind in the industry. You'll gain the knowledge to define, create, implement, and manage the ongoing process associated with building and maintaining a service catalog. I encourage you to check it out.

Troy’s thoughts – what are yours?

I like to say that everyone has some version of a service catalog. It is either a very large cost showing up on your customer’s balance sheet and described as the cost of IT. Or you present a service catalog that describes the value-based outcomes that you provide as a service partner for the revenue you receive. Whether you submit an invoice to your customers or you request continued funding of your budget, either way you are receiving revenue for services rendered. How you present yourselves as either a large cost center or a value-based service organization via a service catalog is your choice… 

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