Within my organization there are several ITIL certified individuals with many years of experience helping organizations to better manage their IT Service Support and Delivery. Nonetheless, I’ve had a hard time finding someone who’s actually been involved in writing a Service Catalog. Moreover, when the subject comes up we often have differing views on what should be included in a service catalog. One colleague believes the catalog should be high level identifying services broadly by category. Business applications for instance might be a service. Internet connectivity might be another. I on the other hand, believe that for the most part a true services catalog must define services specifically. For instance, each application owned and operated by the company would be a specific service. How else can Service Level Management be measured?

As I mentioned in a previous article, I believe the development of a service catalog should begin with those applications or services that are most critical to your company’s business. Beyond that I would suggest creating service definitions only for those services for which you plan apply Service Level Management. If you don’t plan to measure the availability of your internet connectivity for instance then there’s no point in defining it as a service.

I also believe that services will likely fall into several categories. There will be mission critical business applications which must be viewed and defined as services. Other services will likely be infrastructure related services for maintaining the hardware and network infrastructure. Finally, there might be a set of desktop services, and probably other categories I’ve missed. The point being, classifying services might simplify the task of creating a services catalog.

Not having had the pleasure of developing a Service Catalog myself, this is all educated opinion. I’d appreciate any feedback on any experience you may have had developing a service catalog. Below are some links that might help if you’re undertaking such and effort.

Download Evergreen’s Service Catalog Whitepaper

Also, check out our Service Catalog Workshop

Tool and consulting services to help expedite the process of building a service catalog
http://www.centrata.com/solutions/serviceCatalog.html

Free guide to building a service catalog
http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-10878-5322008.html

Example of an IT Infrastructure Service Catalog
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/infrastructure/catalog/

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