Friday 16 March 2007

Service Catalogues - have you got yours?

Those who have already been down the ITIL path recognise the benefits that creating, publishing, maintaining, and promoting a service catalogue can bring. The most cited according to attendees of the 3rd world Service Catalogue conference is that it helps you to manage your user expectations. It's impossible to deliver a service if your user expectations are higher than your caapcity to deliver. The visibility that a catalogue brings to IT services becomes the first line of defense preventing some of those calls to the service desk where the operators have to deliver surprises to users such as 'Sorry, that is outside our remit' or 'that will cost X'.

Increasingly, there is help at hand when it comes to creating these.
New Scale
have been in the ITSM press a lot as they spotted the niche and become market leaders in Service Catalogue management software.

The nice thing about them is that they are willing to share their knowledge to further the cause, rather than holding on to it. Although it is still in early days, I think that the Open Source Community for Service Catalogues could become a really useful resource. Do check it out, and if you have experience of creating a service catalogue, share your story!

Another useful resource for those starting out is the SLA Catalog Toolkit by Musab Qureshi.

Finally I wanted to draw your attention to a book: Defining Success through the IT Service Catalog (read sample | Buy now).

1 comments:

Musab Qureshi said...

Wanted to highlight the updated link to download my guideline document:

http://musabq.blogspot.com/2008/02/it-service-catalogue-guidelines.html

or from www.musabqureshi.com

Regards,

Musab Qureshi

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