INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE
Service catalogue management provides a basis for customer-focused management of IT service delivery, which helps ensure that IT service offerings are aligned with the needs of the business. It does this by providing clear and consistent information on services in a language that the customers will understand and in a format that customers will want to use, thus enabling a constructive dialogue about IT services where all parties have a common understanding of what is being discussed. In this way the process of ordering standard services is simplified and made more efficient because what is being offered is clear, the terms and conditions for its provision are clear and there is a simple and consistent self-service mechanism in place for obtaining it.
Service catalogue management, through the production and maintenance of
the technical service catalogue, provides a source of technical information that enables the IT service provider to manage services more effectively.
Information in the service catalogue enables a better understanding of how the delivery of IT services impacts the business as well as the risks and vulnerabilities that require to be managed by the IT service provider. This provides service level management with a source of information for reporting to customers on
performance, costs and other service issues and provides supplier management with a sound basis for contract negotiation with suppliers.
Integrating the service catalogue with the configuration management database (CMDB) provides a mechanism for linking the outward-looking, business-focused aspects of service provision with the internal, technically focused aspects of
service management.
The provision and management of the service catalogue is in itself a service
delivered by the IT service provider, and as such should encompass all the elements of a service including any SLAs between IT and the customers who use it.
In broad terms, service catalogue management has two elements:
• The initial design and development of the service catalogue: its content and structure, its relationship with the remainder of the service portfolio, in
particular the transfer of services from the service pipeline, the relationship with
the configuration management database, the processes, accountabilities and responsibilities for keeping it up to date, audit, etc.
• The ongoing management of the service catalogue: managing the information in the service catalogue to keep it up to date, complete and accurate as the business and technical environment change, coordinating with changes to the rest of service portfolio and the configuration management database, managing availability, security and performance.