Revisiting ITIL service catalogue
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.
Related posts:
Let the spamming, eh I mean vending, begin. Seriously I was wondering what happened during your last post. The first and last time we closed comments on TIE, I think. Let’s see if people actually read your post and not just the ITIL-keyword.
Hi!
I arrived here thanks to a twitter alarm, instead of google (new techs, new functionalities).
My opinion is that if you are really interested on creating a Service Catalog, the ITIL chapters about this subject are not enough, since they are very generalistic and not very useful.
Search for some books and compare other mate’s work.
And keep in mind that it is not the same a Service Catalogue than a Service Menu (something useful for users or something useful for customers or something useful for IT)
Thanks!
Antonio
Antonio, you’re right, the chapter is very general (ITIL is quite general overall). That might be one reason why people are searching google, to compare other people’s work.
In a sense, that goes a bit against the idea it was written in first place in ITIL in that general way. The writers of ITIL cannot anticipate your organization’s needs or demographics. The stuff that’s in ITIL is suitable for all.
True, it takes some usefulness out of it, but also let people to innovate and do what’s best for their IT departement.
I should add to Kari’s intro, that from a Tech IT Easy-centric standpoint, Kari’s initial ITIL service catalogues has been the number one most visited post on Tech IT Easy in 2007. Second is Cecil Dijoux’s series on High Availability Architectures.
I have 2 questions for you Kari:
1) is ITIL really useful to achieve better project implementation?
2) say you’re a vendor talking to a CIO, is ITIL compliance a serious selling point for your projects?
Hi Jeremy
according to my mind, ITIL is as ISO9002.
1- You can use it “out of the box”. You must adapt to your team (size), your workflow, your management (team & software)…
2- Itil is heavy for a little team. You can use a pareto (a lightweight method). 80% of ITIL for 20% of energy.
3- No Itil without good team tool. You must chose some(s) tool(s) in order manage all aspects of your projects.
PS : I am a very very dummy Itil student
I don’t use in my work.
Jeremy,
I’m not sure about ITIL in a project setting. There are benefits if the whole organization uses ITIL and then, naturally, a project inside that organization should/must follow it. The only benefits for a projects that I can think of is unified language (configuration, problem, incident, release…). ITIL is more about service delivery and maintenance so it might not fit very well projects (because “changes” happen all the time).
If you’re a IT infrastructure vendor or an outsourcing partner, ITIL “compliance” is a good thing. Otherwise I really can’t say how it helps. Then again, from marketing point of view, just mentioning ITIL might convince a CIO that you know something =) (You can bet that the CIO is considering at least two of the following certifications for his IT dept: ITIL (ISO 20000), CobIT, ISO 9001:2000, ISO 15288 and ISO 17799).
Laurent, ISO 9001:2000 is somewhat different as it is a standard. ITIL is just best practices (but ISO has monetized on that by developing ISO 20000). You’re correct that ITIL is heavy for teams and there’s a lot you need to adapt.
If you're a IT infrastructure vendor or an outsourcing partner, ITIL "compliance" is a good thing. Otherwise I really can't say how it helps. Then again, from marketing point of view, just mentioning ITIL might convince a CIO that you know something =) (You can bet that the CIO is considering at least two of the following certifications for his IT dept: ITIL (ISO 20000), CobIT, ISO 9001:2000, ISO 15288 and ISO 17799).