I have been busy lately and have no time to write articles. Today, I have time to write a service catalog.
In recent projects, the service catalog is a hot topic. Most banks, securities, and financial companies in the financial industry have implemented ITIL process management for some years. The most basic service requests, incidents, problems and changes in ITIL have been implemented. At present, most of the projects that customers do in the field of operation and maintenance require Organize the service catalog and implement service level management.
Service catalog introduction
First explain what a service catalog is. The definition of a service catalog in ITIL 4 is: structured information about all services and service products of a service provider, related to a specific target audience. This explanation is a bit obscure. In short, it is a service item provided to business users, just like a restaurant menu. The purpose of service catalog management is to ensure that all stakeholders provide a unified and single source of information for agreed services. For example, when we go to a restaurant, we will know what dishes the restaurant has when we see the menu.
The purpose of service catalog management is to ensure that the service catalog is generated and maintained, because the increasingly complex IT systems and services in the enterprise will often change. New services are online, and some services are decommissioned and offline. Therefore, the service catalog Updates require a certain process to maintain. Just like in a restaurant, if the chef changes and some dishes need to be changed, then the menu also needs to be changed.
The value of service catalog management is that the service catalog provides a central information source about the IT services delivered by service providers, which can ensure that the business can view the detailed information and status of IT services at any time. In the actual operation of the enterprise, although the business department uses various business application systems and desktop services provided by the IT department every day to support the daily work of the department, the business department knows the specific work content of the IT department. Very rarely, there are obvious gaps in the communication between business and IT, which are mainly reflected in:
- The business does not know what services IT can provide. As long as the business thinks it should be provided by IT, it will seek a solution from IT;
- Business expectations for services do not match the actual capabilities of IT. Due to high expectations, IT services cannot be met;
- IT lacks clear planning, agreed agreements and scientific evaluation methods for the various IT services provided to the business, and the service quality cannot be guaranteed;
The above situation reflects the lack of communication chain between business and IT. A service catalog is a collection of services that an enterprise can provide. A service catalog contains multiple services and service descriptions, including service-related party information, service expected results, and dependencies between services. The management of the service catalog is an effective means of internal management. Through the combing of the service catalog, IT can provide a clear service chain, integrate and organize various service resources within IT, and achieve management services through effective maintenance of the service catalog Level and purpose of service cost.
Two perspectives of service catalog
The businesses of enterprises are diverse, especially the large financial industry and some large enterprises. Hundreds of application systems are used, and there are many supporting systems, such as OA, mail, communication tools, IT departments and many others. Tools used, plus infrastructure and data center management. Many enterprise service catalogs are chaotic, and some services are not used or offline, occupying various resources and causing huge waste. So how should the service catalog be sorted out?
First of all, we need to understand that the services provided by the IT department can be viewed from two perspectives. The first is from a business perspective. IT provides information technology business services to support business departments in their daily business activities. The second is a technical perspective. IT provides information technology support services, including technical services and supporting services.
- The business service catalog can include application system services, such as sales systems, purchasing systems, and after-sales services, as well as 24*7 warranty services and data warehouse services provided by the IT service desk.
- Technical services are mainly for infrastructure services in data centers.
- Supporting services mainly include OA, email, account management, authority management, desktop management, etc.
From a business perspective, IT services can be organically combined with service-level management, an agreement is reached on service quality, and indicators are monitored and reported to measure the service quality of IT service providers.
From a technical perspective, IT services can sort out and organize technical work, guide resource allocation, and perform cost accounting.
The service catalog needs to consider these two perspectives at the same time when designing, and organize packages according to business departments.
Steps to create a service catalog
The establishment of the service catalog can be divided into the following five steps:
The various IT application systems and components that support the operation of the business department are self-operated by the enterprise or purchased from outsourcing. In the initial stage of establishing the service catalog, the first step is to define the interface of customers, users, service parties and suppliers.
The second step is to decompose business departments and business processes. There are often interfaces and interfaces between the business processes of each department. In the process of decomposition, it is necessary to clearly define the interfaces and interfaces between departments as much as possible.
The third step is to disassemble into a business service catalog according to business processes and activities. Collect brief information of each service catalog, including service time, responsible department, responsible person, assisting department, assisting personnel, supplier, etc.
The fourth step is to disassemble IT services from the perspective of IT to form a technical service catalog and a supporting service catalog.
The fifth step is to combine the business service catalog, technical service catalog and supporting service catalog to form user packages for each business department. As shown below.
Establish service catalog management process
In the process of implementing the project, it is not only necessary to help customers sort out the service catalog, but also to establish a good process and standardize the operation of employees. When a new service is launched or changed, the service catalog can be added and modified in a timely manner; when the service is retired and offline , The service catalog can be deleted, and the corresponding service can be deleted at the same time to release system resources.
In the process, a more important role is the service catalog manager or service catalog administrator, who is responsible for approving additions, deletions, and inspections to the service catalog. This role may be part-time, but the company needs to assign this role to people in order to better implement the service catalog management process. In my experience, I suggest that this role can be performed by a service level manager.
The service catalog process can be realized by service request or change process. If it is related to the release of resources, such as monitoring, server, database, etc., other processes need to be linked.
to sum up
The service catalog is a window of IT to the outside world, and is the basis for realizing service level management. It can also be associated with IT budget accounting to clarify the price and cost of IT services. It can be said that service catalog management is the first step towards refined IT service management.
Although ITIL has been implemented in China for more than ten years, there are not many companies that do well in service catalog management. Although DevOps is currently popular in the Internet and financial circles, if corporate IT departments want to move from Party A to Party B, from a cost center to a profit center, they also need to sort out the service catalog to lay a good foundation for changing roles.
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