By Bruno Fichou, Stephane Quidet
How can we, in our industrialized world, consider selling or providing services without a clear definition of these services? IT departments are beginning to realize the importance of formally defining the critical IT services they provide to their clients, however executing on this can be challenging. IT organizations are moving slowly towards a service model, but need additional attention on becoming customer centric.
The Service Catalogue
The Service Catalogue is a newly announced cornerstone for IT Organizations. Following and guiding this trend, ITILv3 authors have introduced the Service Catalogue Management Process to “provide a single source of consistent information on all of the agreed services, and ensure that it is widely available to those who are approved to access it."
ITIL tells us that ideally you need two catalogues: a Business Service Catalogue and a Technical Service Catalogue. The Business Service Catalogue should contain details on all the IT services delivered to the customers, with relationships to the business units and the business process that rely on the IT services. It responds to customer needs, with some marketing focus.
The Technical Service Catalogue, which underpins the Business Service Catalogue, should not be visible to customers but needs to contain the exhaustive list of services produced by the IT Department. The Technical Service Catalogue is an extension of the Business Service Catalogue. It describes services hidden to the customers. For example, the ”mail service” will be in the Business Service Catalogue, however the “Desktop service”, “Mail server service”, “OS service” or “backup service” that underpin that service will be in the Technical Service Catalogue.
To be complete, a Service Catalogue must rely on service levels. When agreed upon between an IT service provider and the IT customer(s), service levels define the key service targets and are named Service Level Agreements (SLA). They can be signed up and supported by the Business Service Catalogue. When agreed between an IT service provider and another part of the same organization, service levels contain targets that underpin those within the SLA. In that case they are named Operational Level Agreements (OLA) and will help operate the Technical Service Catalogue.
Developing a Service Catalogue
The development of a complete Service Catalogue is not straight forward. Implementing ITIL best practices will depend on the objectives that the organization has decided focus on, on the gap that needs to be filled and other criteria, including:
· How mature is the customer organization?
· How well is the idea of “service” understood and shared throughout the IT organization?
· How critical is IT for the business?
· How large is the IT organization?
A good starting point would be to formalize SLA’s with customers and agree on a level of service that the IT organization can meet. Then, it is convenient to define OLA’s with the supporting departments. Next, reinforcing the customer relationship management process, will allow customers to focus on business needs and added value.
This approach is not enough when it is time to evaluate costs. Services are priced and included in a published Business Service Catalogue. Customer Relationship Managers must rely on known OLA’s in order to define SLA’s.
In large organizations, IT Operations not only contributes to high customer service, but it also serves other IT departments. Additional value is then brought in defining a Technical Service Catalogue which gives a clear view on what the IT Operations provides. OLA’s can then be priced like SLA’s, linked to services in the Technical Service Catalogue. In highly effective organizations, each IT Department is a Service Unit which provides services, publishes a catalogue and is recognized as an internal provider. So, the path to Service Management starts with SLA and OLA definition.
The Business Service Catalogue comes next. A small IT Department can easily survive without a Technical Service Catalogue; however, larger IT Organizations will find much more than formal agreements in that tool:
- IT employees become more aware of where they have to focus their attention
- Ease of access to the service list
- Better SLA and OLA management
- IT Organization reinforced and promoted
In the end, designing Service Catalogues is a way to improve efficiency and satisfaction of both IT customers and IT Staff.
