What should an IT service catalog contain, and what does it look like
Although ITSM and ITIL consider the IT service catalog to be one of the key building blocks of service management, in practice, it is not so easy to find out what the catalog should contain if you decide to create and maintain one in your company. Let's look at the basics of what an IT service catalog should contain and how to get started.
How to start creating an IT service catalog
First and foremost, you need to think practically about an IT service catalog. It must not be a document for the sake of a document. It should be a standardized description of what IT provides to the rest of the organization, under what conditions, and who is responsible for what (which service). Think of services as something perceived by their customers. Sometimes managers get tangled up in whether it is a service or a process. This can be confusing and not always clear. In some cases, it can even be one-to-one. Whenever you think about services, think about them as a customer. This will help you in defining services for your catalog. The customer is always interested in the outcome - for example, their computer is connected to the internet. He doesn't care about all the processes or activities that have to happen in the background to make the connection work. He is interested in the result = the service that you as IT provide to him. You need to know what that service consists of and what all the other supporting services depend on.
The IT service catalog should primarily serve to clear the service offering and contribute to the ability to share information and IT services contained therein between the business and IT.
What are the most common details you need to track about IT services
- Service name
- Service Description
- Service availability
- Backup or fallback options
- Service owner
- Service price
- Service customer and their representative
- Service criticality
Service name
The name of the IT service should be primarily understood by its customers, i.e. the people in the organization. A good name will prevent many misunderstandings about what is meant by this or that service. When naming it, the business side - the user's point of view - should be considered above all. The users are the ones who must understand the name of the service first. Consider a name and naming that is common in your company and understandable to your people.
Service description
The service description specifies the name of the service and should be concise and clear so as to leave no one in doubt as to what a particular service contains and includes. We recommend an IT service description of no more than three sentences.
Service availability
Service availability means at what times the service is available - meaning days of the week and hours of the day. Availability is one of the key indicators of service performance. ( The most common availability is either 7x24, that is, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, or services are available on weekdays and normal business hours, for example, Mon-Fri, 9 am-4 pm. Defining the availability of a service is important so that customers know when they can use it and when they cannot. It is important for IT to be able to guarantee capacity availability. For many IT services, availability has a significant impact on the price (the more available the service is, the more expensive it is). Service unavailability can be caused by outages or changes (e.g. software updates).
Backup and fallback options
It is a good idea to have a description of what to do in the event of an outage/service unavailability - either as backup or a fallback/rollback solution - what to do if the service or product fails. For data, have the backup method described here.
Service owner
The owner of the service is the person responsible for it within the organization and also the owner of its budget.
Service customer and their representative
The service customer is the person or group of people who use the service. The customer is important to the very existence of the service (without the customer the service is meaningless) and is also important to its naming and the correct determination of all the KPIs of the service. Since the customer of the service is usually a group of people or an entire company, a representative must be appointed for each IT service. The representative together with the service owner negotiates the parameters and the quality of the service. The service representative has the authority to negotiate also on service changes.
The role of the service customer representative is invaluable in service management and without it, IT service management in a company cannot be reasonably implemented.
IT service criticality
The criticality or importance of the service must come from the service customer. It is based on the impact that the unavailability of the service has on the company and its processes - how much it cripples the processes and functioning of the company. Also important is the speed of service recovery if a service outage occurs. The typical and most commonly used IT service criticality scale is as follows
- Mission Critical - these are absolutely essential IT services, their unavailability will cause a major problem to the organization that is not tolerable and causes significant damage. Such a service, therefore, requires continuous availability as well as an immediately executable fallback solution
- Business Critical - similar to the previous one, these are essential IT services, a short outage is possible, but a longer interruption causes significant damage. The service requires a high level of availability with fast recovery.
- Business Operational - these are mostly services designed for internal customers only, the unavailability means increased costs and decreased quality of operation. Such services require a high level of availability.
- Administrative Services - these are mostly services designed for internal customers only, the unavailability means a reduction in operations. Such services require a medium level of availability.
Continuous service improvement
Nothing is perfect and so continuous improvement means moving forward. This includes defining what the target parameters of the service should be (e.g. target availability) if the current values are not satisfactory or not affordable.