Reducing IT Costs, Step 6: Design a Service Catalog

Computerworld - Sixth in a series of articles expanding on "Ten Steps to Modifying User Behavior and Reducing IT Costs," an October Computerworld.com column by Computer Associates International Inc.'s Stevie Sacks.
Now that you have measured your IT usage, you will need to design a service catalog with choices at different price points, which I'll discuss a little later. This article takes a practical look at both public-facing and ITIL-compliant IT service inventory catalogs.
Why two catalogs? Each catalog has a different audience and purpose. The public-facing catalog for self-service subscription should be designed for ease of use and to support the customer's need to make informed decisions. The services catalog should include the data required to define the components that support a particular service. Some standards organizations like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework go so far as to designate the software, hardware and personnel needed to perform the provisioning of the service. The services catalog will also contain additional service definitions that aren't available for subscription, such as decommissioning of hardware.
I will focus on the public-facing or self-service catalog, which becomes a tool when allowing customers to pick and choose the services they want.
Let's first look at the internal, IT-focused service catalog. Your service catalog should include all information needed to support initiatives such as service-level management, configuration, change and other libraries. An ITIL-compliant catalog should house service-level information, ownership, support, authority and financial information. The catalog should be designed to work with or act as input to chargeback, service-level agreement and service-desk software, which serves as an underpinning for the standardization of definitions and terminology.
The Configuration Database Management contains all of the details, relationships and history of each configuration item. Your internal services catalog can group such items as they pertain to supporting each definition. Your self-service catalog presents a subset of services that are available to your customers for subscription.
If you're considering a move to a service-provider model, you'll probably need to create an online service catalog with a self-service menu and shopping cart. You may want to set up your online storefront with related offerings, such as the human resources and facilities services that are needed for a new employee, along with adding user IDs. You'll also want to set up e-mail and file access, and assign an office location.
If you find yourself struggling with the level of detail you will present to your customers, you may want to consider the following areas:

• Group service offerings meaningfully for easy navigation. For example, consider the path for an employee who needs a new laptop. Your catalog might list new or used laptops with component upgrade entries, various memory configurations, hard drives and screen sizes. This will give the user an opportunity to choose the one that best fits his needs and budget.


• Promote informed trade-offs between price and service levels, size and quantity, etc. An uninformed service-catalog user could choose an expensive level of service that might not be warranted by the task performed. Sometimes, one large server is substantially cheaper than two smaller servers. An informed user can make the choice that best serves the business.