IT Service Catalogue

The IT Service Catalogue is one of the most valuable elements of a comprehensive approach to IT service management and it should be therefore given proper care and attention. The purpose of the IT Service Catalogue is to provide a single source of consistent information on all operational services and ensure that it’s widely available to those who are authorized to access it. It’s like a restaurant menu that gives your customers overview what types of services your IT organization offers.

Before we get into more detail I should say what exactly is an IT service. ITIL defines service as a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. IT service is made up of a combination of information technology, people and processes. A customer-facing IT service directly supports the business processes of one or more customers and its service level targets should be defined in a service level agreement. A sample of such service could be for example a provision of new e-mail mailbox.

Other IT services, called supporting services, are not directly used by the business but are required by the service provider to deliver customer-facing services. In many cases, one service can be made up of other services, which are themselves made up of one or more IT systems within an overall infrastructure including hardware, software and networks, together with environments, data and applications. The best practice it to split the IT Service Catalogue into Business Service Catalogue with customer-facing services and Technical Service Catalogue with supporting services.

Relation between business and technical service catalogue

Design of IT Service Catalogue

Business Service Catalogue needs to be written as much as possible in a clear non-technical language so your business users understand it. On the other hand, Technical Service Catalogue is not intended to be published outside of the IT organization so it should have the technology solution documented in detail in technical language. Many organizations maintain a service catalogue that includes only customer-facing services but it’s good to at least have the Technical Service Catalogue presented via the functional specification of a service.

The first step is definition of the service portfolio. The service catalogue should at least contain:

• Service Name
• Service Description
• Service Owner
• SLA (availability, time to react and time to solve)

You can also include contact and service charges in case your IT organization charges for its services. I recommend to structure your catalogue based on categories of services and gradually get into more detail. You can start with a basic template I provide bellow but it’s important to customize it for your needs so it would cover all services your IT organization provides.

Once you have the catalogue complete don’t forget to verify it with your staff and business users. Definition of the service catalogue can often result in change requests to service level agreements or your service portfolio so it would better align with business needs.

Publishing of IT Service Catalogue

Once you have your catalogue complete there are several ways to let your users know about the services you provide. The most basic option is to have the table or document with your services available for download on your intranet or shared drive. Most business users will however never bother to download and read such document so a much better option is to publish your IT services as structured pages directly on your intranet or website. Really good examples of service catalogues that can also help you define your services could be seen for example on the Stanford University or Harvard University websites.

The best you can do is to have the service catalogue integrated directly in your Service Desk. That way customers (both internal and external) can easily see services that are available to them and can create requests directly for the service they need and see their SLAs. Bellow you can see example of service catalogue that is part of the Service Desk I set up for GTS ALIVE Group.