ITIL defines Service Catalogs as the portion of the Service Portfolio that contains services that are either active or approved and published for delivery to customers or prospects.  The approval process would include a review of numerous things, including the project management and financial aspects as well as the “price” to be charged and the acceptable profit margin, if applicable.

Many companies struggle with the creation of their service catalogs due to the confusion over the difference between technologies versus services; in effect, over-complicating a document that addresses two basic things:  (1) aconcise list of the services that are offered and (2) a concise list of the services that were historically offered.  Concise being the keyword in achieving a properly authored service catalog.

If a given company owns multiple data centers with hundreds of servers that run a variety of operating systems, including versions of Windows, Unix and Macintosh platforms, and offers customers features including high availability, backup and disaster recovery, choice of operating platform, infrastructure (domain, identity and security management) and differing levels of bandwidth, the company service catalog would reflect one service:  Application Hosting.  All other sub-offerings should be considered features, which would be combined into different packages based upon either user profiles or customized needs, and priced based upon market demand.

A company that offers over one hundred different educational courses in classroom, on-line and/or pre-recorded media formats really offers one service:  Education. A business that sells micro-computer network components and employs professionals that maintain the computer systems of small companies that cannot afford in-house IT may only offer two services:  Systems Administration and Hardware Repair.

There are few service-based companies that offer more than a handful of services. Many firms and internal IT organizations struggle with this fact; as organization members that are responsible for the differing products (or workgroups) attempt to solidify the value of their offerings by having them recognized as unique services, when many are not.  ITIL describes these offerings, for the most part, as processes, packages, features or attributes.  Regardless of what hardware platform and operating system are used, a customer purchases application hosting.  The customer may not even ask for the technical details of how their service was provided.

To further illustrate, the service catalog may be thought of as an “elevator” speech that describes to the non-technical end-user, minimal information about what is being offered in the marketplace; it is easy to understand, explained in as few words as possible, and holds no ambiguity.  Many can be described in one to two words:  network architecture, telecommunications, voicemail integration, disaster recovery, training, hardware disposal and security management are all very acceptable, to the point service catalog offerings.

A critical component for successful implementation of a business service catalog is a clear and concise Service Level Agreement (SLA) describing the time to deliver the service supplied to an end user and an agreement about the service availability. Dashboards are efficient ways of accessing service catalog management tools and reports on each  SLA attached to the service catalog.

A service catalog with SLA’s attached can usually be developed over the course of a few weeks in a few short meetings.  It is important to keep in mind that the user of the service catalog is your customer, not the internal organization.  Keeping it simple is the challenge; the realization that your organization offers few or even a single service does diminish its value.   To the contrary, it makes it easier for end-users to understand both the vision and the purpose of an IT organization.  Just consider the simplicity and marketing value if every employee in an organization can clearly state, in no uncertain terms, whom they work for and what services their company offers.