Service Catalog by Intracart at Crayodyne

The ITIL service catalog. You’ve heard about it. You’ve been told it’s important. Maybe you’ve even ordered one. But do you know how it works and why you need it?

Let us pull back the veil for you from the mysteries. ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a codification of best practices for the delivery of high-quality information technology services. Simply put, it’s a set of efficiency guidelines for IT departments. The service catalog is one of the key suggestions in the ITIL guidelines.

How a service catalog works is this. Your company has its internal customers, formerly called “users” in IT office parlance. They have needs: for information, products and services. How does your company meet their needs?

Do you have an employees’ manual with lists of things available to employees, and a supervisors’ manual with lists of things supervisors typically need to order? Do you have a service desk or manager that employees and supervisors routinely call or visit whenever they need something?

These are ways that businesses in the old days used to dispense information, products and services to personnel, but such systems are outdated. What service desk can handle hundreds of phone calls a week, and visitors stopping by to ask for monitors, laptop repairs, software, wireless network access, and new distribution lists, ad infinitum? What employees’ manual or supervisors’ guide can quickly take an order from a customer, freeing IT staff from busywork so they can get on with priority assignments?

When companies were small and internal-use products were minimal, manuals and service desks could handle the need of internal customers. But no more. Businesses are demanding time-saving systems that cut out the red tape and simply get the goods to the people who need them. That’s where the concept of an actionable service catalog comes in. An actionable service catalog is the most practical way of implementing ITIL Service Catalog guidelines.

An ordinary service catalog is simply a listing of available products and services, as static and as boring as a phone book. But an actionable service catalog is a user-friendly, online, interactive listing. It allows customers to select what they want from your online selection and put the items in their online shopping cart. An actionable catalog includes an informative, concise description of each product and service you offer. It guides your customers to fill in required input fields (ensuring all order details are clear and complete). The actionable catalog also specifies the service terms for each item ordered (“service level agreements” in IT-speak). In other words, the customer is told at the time of placing an order when they can expect delivery and by whom.

If an actionable service catalog is starting to sound like the hottest idea since sliced bread, it is. Gone are the lines at the service desk from people needing to order and ask. Gone are the hours of wasted company time spent every day by employees searching out information for simple things they need. An actionable service catalog is a one-stop-shop that streamlines orders for everyone: both IT staff (as providers) and supervisors and employees (as internal customers). An actionable service catalog can even be adapted to handle the needs of external customers.

Unfortunately, not all service catalogs are created equal, not even all actionable service catalogs. The ITIL Service Catalog is concept, an ideal. It is a guideline only. Your IT department must somehow live up to it. How can you do such a thing? How do you get started, and how do you guarantee your catalog is put together properly? How do you make sure it doesn’t turn out as cumbersome and useless as the old static manual it was created to replace?

Crayodyne specializes in such knowledge and provides information and products that companies need to create efficient actionable service catalogs. Download our free report, Service Catalog – An Introduction, by filling the form below, to learn what to work toward and what to avoid when you build your first interactive catalog.   

Implementing a well-designed, actionable service catalog may be the best thing you ever did for your company. It conserves the energies of IT staff as well as all employees in your business.

It wins big points with the CEO and reduces the ever-present threat of IT outsourcing.

As such, it’s worth learning about.

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