Best Practices › Overview

Overview

Historically, IT organizations have focused on technology without clear accountability for adding business value, while their customers have focused on costs. Increased competition in the marketplace and increased dependence on high technology demand that IT organizations do the following:

• Build a stronger understanding of the customers they serve
• Work in a close partnership with them to deliver true value

These business alignment initiatives require the following:

• A clear definition of the services that the IT organization provides
• An understanding of the components and resources that constitute the services
• An identification of the costs of the associated services

With centralization of IT services and movement toward a utility model, implementing a service catalog becomes an increasingly important necessity. Using a service catalog leads to better IT service alignment with business goals and improved internal customer satisfaction. It also leads to standardized processes to achieve greater operational efficiency.

The ITIL™ (IT Infrastructure Library) framework stipulates that IT organizations start their process enhancement initiatives by developing a service catalog to do the following:

List all the services being provided

Summarize the details of the services, customers, service designers, and service administrators

Many IT groups produce a service catalog as part of their ITIL Service Level Management deployment. Others view the opportunity to leverage the service catalog as the focal point for communication between IT and the business.