Hey there everyone! It is me. Yes again. I want to qualify my belief that establishing a Service Catalog is a great undertaking. There is no doubt this is an unruly call to duty but it can be a valuable achievement that provides a tremendous amount of benefit not to just IT but the entire organization.
Hey there everyone! It is me. I would like to add some thoughts to my last posting about the advantage to developing a Service Catalog and CMDB as parallel initiatives. While I would agree that this may add some additional complexity to the project, I think the value that can be captured from such an approach will bring about true measurable value to the organization that may not be achieved otherwise.
The inherent nature of ITIL processes almost always leads to ITIL gridlock. In my experience on implementing an individual ITIL process, there is always a grocery list of opportunities that need to be placed on hold until a dependency can be addressed by another process area. This is especially a challenge in the initial phases of an ITIL implementation because typically most of the support structure needs to be addressed to properly establish a portion of an ITIL discipline. Establishing SLM is no exception.
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Greetings and Salutations, fellow bloggers; it is I once again. Recently I have been spending a considerable amount of time helping organizations think about establishing Service Level Management within the context of ITSM process improvement projects. It is increasingly apparent that to derive real value from a Service Catalog, one cannot focus on this tower of knowledge independently. There needs to be equal focus in establishing the CMDB (which is the other needed knowledge tower). This is largely due to the significant dependencies that a catalog has on a CMDB.
Why do I say this? The reason for this is due to the dependencies that a Service Catalog has upon a related CMDB. Without a CMDB (in place or at least in some significant state), true Service Level Management (including a value-providing Service Catalog) cannot be reached.
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One of the first questions when contemplating a Service Catalog is, “Where do we start?”
The project I’m currently working on is an “ITIL maturity improvement” project, or to describe it more accurately, it’s the first phase of a long-term IT Service Management improvement program. In this phase, we’re working directly on ITIL Incident Management, Problem Management and Service Desk.
But if you know ITIL, you know it’s impossible to only work on one process area… in fact one of the key roles of the Service Desk is to be the manager and negotiator of the Service Catalog and the resulting Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
A recent engagement on developing a service catalog for a client gave me pause to think about the importance of service catalogs and why companies need to develop them. That lead me to think about the top 10 reasons that companies develop service catalogs. I would love to get your feedback, suggestions and edits on this list. Let me know what you think.
10. In order to develop a taxonomy and hierarchy associated with IT services, that establishes the ‘highest’ (broadest) level within the Service Catalog structure and provides a comprehensive infrastructure that supports all services with minimal anticipated revisions. Service Families should be aligned with the functional areas that they support.
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