Key Benefits Of A Service Catalogue
The service catalog is a well-designed, single, consistent source of information on all IT and business services available in the organization. It is one of the most useful technology products in IT service management (ITSM) today. But how can your organization use and benefit from its Service Catalogue?
It should be much more efficient than a two-dimensional list of available IT and business services. Please read on to learn how to make the most of this versatile ITSM capability.
Understanding the IT service catalog
The service catalog can serve as a statement for an IT organization (not just its ITSM capabilities). It can support everything from day-to-day operations (and challenges) to continuous service development (CSI).
1. Improve your Self-Service services
The service catalog can help take your personal IT contribution from basic to awesome. I have said (well, written) many times before but you have to repeat it: one of the golden rules of ITSM is "Always make it easy for people to use your services." Therefore, use your IT service catalog to sign up for backup users and your IT desk portal to install events and applications.
Usually, in IT, we use the language of professionals, engineers, and sysadmin often (okay, maybe) not translating into the whole business. While, thanks to taking the approach to the service catalog, by defining what your service offers in business language make your services easier for end users and customers to reach out to.
Also, the inclusion of additional service information such as availability, cost, and commitment to support - and possibly a comparison between similar services - makes it easier for customers to know not only what is available but also what best suits their needs (and potential budgets).
Integrating the service catalog with self-management and automation capabilities and maximizing both the efficiency and ease of use of the event login process based on user experience.
2. Align the end users behaviour with demand management
Demand management is an ITIL process that resides in the ITIL lifecycle service planning phase and is a force that aims to understand, anticipate, and influence customer demand for services.
It works with corporate capacity management skills to ensure that the service provider - the IT department in most cases - has sufficient capacity to meet the required demand for specific services. Simply put, demand management is a process that helps you know when your busy times are and plan accordingly (and that may lead to certain demands at less popular times)!
Having a service catalog will give your IT department the opportunity to carefully manage the need for its services. It is one of the key functions of demand management to influence user behavior through Business Performance Patterns (PBAs). Where PBA is a loading profile of one or more business functions that help service providers establish application patterns using real-life examples that are relevant to the organization.
Examples of value-added PBAs include:
Highlighting extended use until Christmas in retail organizations.
Identifying financial systems that will require increased capacity to continue until the end of the tax year.
Awareness services that need to be done efficiently during the audit.