I’ve seen a steady stream of visitors finding their way to my last year’s post about ITIL service catalogues. At one point I had to finally close the comments, because some people felt it was a correct place to advertise their solutions. Even after leaving the company I did the project for, I’ve been approached by a certain vendor on how that project is coming along and if their software could be of any use – to my personal e-mail address.

So, vendor’s are really interested in selling their wares – and for a good reason. The steadily increasing page views show that more and more people are interested in creating their service catalogs. The other reason is that a big number of available solutions either totally suck and/or are extremily expensive. Of course, developing one’s own solution is also insanely expensive. The software vendors can ask for any amount of money and it can be too easy to think the software will solve their ITIL problems. Unfortunately, things are not that easy.

My advice for making a good service catalogue is rather simple. Read the chapter about in ITIL and understand it. The mistake I made in my project was focusing on the solution. A static HTML-page might be just what you need. Seriously, it’s enough for Google. In my opinion, their page fulfills the needs of their customers.

Understand that your IT department is not Amazon selling all the world’s books to people around the world. Your scope is much more narrowly defined.

Your customers want to do their work and not shop around for stuff they only need to do their work. Yes, they will spend weeks to choose the optimal mobile phone or printer for their home use, but, at work, they will be satisfied with whatever. This is why ITIL makes so big thing about talking in “customer’s language”. For example, you’re not selling them a Lenovo Thinkpad X50 with 2 GB RAM and 80 GB HDD with Core 2 Duo with AC adapter and all the necessary Software installed. As the IT department, you’re providing them with a Laptop. The guy at Accounts Payable is not looking for Nokia E61i with 1GB SD-card, FM tuner, 3G connectivity and PC Suite to sync all their stuff with their computer. He needs a Mobile phone with E-mail (and with great probability, delivered today).

You might be tempted to give all the SLAs, shopping baskets, delivery tracking, and all these maginficient features to your customers and many vendors remember to tell that their software makes this easy. Well, yeah, if you have that information to begin with. As a modern IT departement, yours too most likely has outsourced most operations to many providers. You really shouldn’t try to fantasize giving your customers more information than you yourself have.

Anyway, I think the authors of that section in ITIL should add “Keep it simple” somewhere there.

Another challenge in implementing ITIL service catalogue is that many managers might feel that it’s not important like the other stuff there. If I remember correctly, ITIL promises user satisfaction gains, but not much more. For budget-constrained IT departements, that’s not enough motivation to do it – unless their performance bonuses are tied to user satisfaction index. Even if that is the case, they are interested in it in so far as their bonuses are concerned.

ITIL service catalog is only about making things easier for the user. And there lies the problem, because it is still wide-spread sentiment in many IT units that user is the problem and in many IT projects the user perspective is summarily forgotten about. Interenstingly enough, many of these projects are doomed to fail exactly for this reason. So, above anything, keep your users in mind when developing your service catalog. Take a look at the Google one again.

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