Service Catalog 101

Is the fed's IT budget more transparent than your company's?

As seen on the WSJ blog, The U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra launched an IT Spending Dashboard today.  Visually and technically, the site seem well designed.  It presents the projected spending and actual expenditures from various departments, the ability to drill through to the details and dissect the data by different time dimension values. 

I am impressed that the federal government is able to pull together data from so many departments to show how your tax dollars are going into IT spendings.  In contrast, many IT departments in the enterprises are still struggling with this idea of managing IT services as a portfolio.  Fewer yet have started reporting their IT spendings and making the results available to the stakeholders.

It is true that implementing reporting and BI in IT costs money, but shining the light on your IT spendings, starting with your Service Portfolio and Service Catalog may actually save you money.  You might just find some dollars that you can reinvest into ares that are more critical to the business, e.g. virtualization or improving customer retention.  newScale CTO Rodrigo Flores recently called this No 8 of out of the 10 best practices for the service request catalog in his blog. 

Do we run this risk of private enterprises falling behind the federal government in using the technology to run "business" better?  What are your thoughts?

Begin from the beginning - IT Continual Service Improvement

This week I attended a well attended talk by Gary Case, an author of the ITIL v3 Continual Service Improvement book and a consultant for Pink Elephant.  The itSMF folks in the San Francisco Bay Area have staged some pretty high quality talks and they don't charge for admissions.  Definitely worth checking out if you consider yourself an IT professional.

Having been involved on the operational as well as the product side, the topic of continual  improvement is dear to my heart.  As Gary pointed out during his talk, there are quite a few hurdles in the implementation of IT CSI with the clients he worked with.  I have also heard similar sentiments while pitching the value of visibility, reporting and executive dashboards for Service Catalog implementations. 

Here are a few that I thought might be interesting for you too:

1. There is nothing to measure or report on until the system is in production - Not true.  You need to consider the metrics and measurability as you design your IT services.  Only then you will have a well-considered service that provides metrics that are meaningful to the business.
2. We already generate tons of reports; we don't need more - There are different audiences to different reports.  If you send 50 pages of reports to everybody, chances are nobody will read any of them.  Figure out what's important for each role, e.g. IT executives, director of IT groups and service managers, then give them only 2 or 3 pages of relevant reports.  When you talk to your stakeholders, chances are you'd realize you can get rid of most of what you are generating and create a few new ones.
3. We don't want to report now because our metrics are really bad - You DO want to start reporting now and institute an improvement process.  In fact, showing the poor metrics now enables you to report improvements and good ROI for the CSI process down the road.  Look at your problem as an opportunity!
4. It costs too much to measure - That maybe true.  In fact, I heard anecdotally that it cost some organization 10 working days each month to generate reports.  I think the solution boils down to better service design and better reporting tools.  Measurement and report generation should be automated and audited periodically.  You want the metrics to guide the organization towards its business goals instead of consuming massive resources for its own sake.  

When you consider a Service Catalog or any other service management tools, put a premium on its ability to support a rigorous CSI process through a robust reporting capability.

In fact, after making an initial post on this topic, I found a good discussion thread by some folks on the IT Skeptic website.
 

Welcome to Service Catalog 101

As the statement at the top of this page indicates, we excited to share best practices and examples on how an actionable IT Service Catalog can make an impact in your company. 

We'll cover topics ranging from strategic Service Portfolio Management and IT Demand Management to more tactical Service Request Management and Request Fulfillment.  Learn things like how to leverage a Service Catalog for greater cost transparency, for streamlining employee onboarding, or even for managing virtual server sprawl.

The bloggers in the photos to the right here all have a different point of view. They are ready to jump in and write about a variety of Service Catalog topics, so stay tuned! 

Until next time.....Mary