As most of us are already aware, the business of IT has
become even more critical in ensuring the overall success of an
organization. In today’s fast pace and
fluid environments the statement that “every business decision triggers and IT
event” is becoming increasingly true for those of us who operate in the world
of ITSM. One of the most valuable tools that we can employ is our service
catalog. In a mature ITIL organization
we can have two views of this catalog. The first being the Business/Customer
catalog where we connect our customers/users to the standard IT services that
we offer, deliver and support. The
second view is the Technical/Supporting service catalog, which when
appropriately maintained is a very powerful tool that allows us to relate IT
services to our supporting services and the underlying supporting
infrastructure. It is this second view
that we will review here.
Our service catalog provides us with a central source of
information on all of the IT services delivered. It ensures that all areas of the business can
view an accurate and consistent picture of their IT services, the details and
their status. It displays the services
in use, how they are intended to be used, the business process they enable and
the levels and quality that the customer can expect to be delivered for each
service. In the Technical/Supporting catalog we will document and blueprint the
connections between our underlying supporting services and infrastructure to
those business IT services. This will enable our ITSM organization to enable
proactive Service Level Management and ensure more accurate and speedier
incident management and change impact analysis processes just to name a few.
By having a clear and accurate picture we can ensure that
during strategy sessions appropriate and wise decisions can be made about the
current and future use of resources.
This will include having an accurate financial picture through financial
management for IT services. The Business
Relationship Management process can ensure the right services are being
delivered and can be appropriately supported.
In the design stage of our service lifecycle we can design
improvements, additions, transfers or retirements without negatively impacting
our current resources and services and their SLAs. Appropriate levels of
capacity, availability, continuity and security can be delivered to meet the
dynamic demand from our customers.
In Transition accurate risk assessments can be made through
the utilization of our Technical/Catalog allowing our Change Management and
Release and Deployment Management processes to more swiftly assess, build and
release changes into the live environment meeting rapidly changing business
requirements while reducing risk and the possibility of unproductive rework.
During Operations, the technical catalog is an essential
tool for the service desk and their ability to carry out accurate and prompt
remediation of incidents by presenting a clear roadmap in diagnosing incidents
from descriptions of symptoms from customers on which services they are having
issues. Problem Management can use these diagrams to do forensic investigation
or proactive Problem Management and ensuring the SIPs can be completed more
quickly with more robust resolutions.
Finally, within CSI all processes and functions will be able
to see those opportunities for improvement by accurately finding those areas of
our environment that will benefit from a redesign, update or enhancement.
For additional information and training please see http://www.itsmacademy.com/itil-sd/ ITSM Academy's next Service Design class will be August 22 - 26 2016
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