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I don’t think there is anyone in the IT Service Management world who would argue the importance of the Service Catalogue, but just where do you start?

I liken the business Service Catalogue to a restaurant menu.  You have a choice of items you can select:

• Steak and Chips
• Fish of the Day
• Coffee

For each of these choices there will then be some further decisions you need to make - how do you want your steak cooked? Do you want sauce with the chips? How is the Fish of the Day cooked? What sort of coffee do you want - latte, filter, flat white, capuccino?

Underlying the customer facing menu are the recipes - the equivalent of the Technical Services Catalogue.  The customer, with a few exceptions, does not need to view the recipe just as, in the ITSM world, the customer does not need to know what underlying services make up the Service they are purchasing.

Going down a further layer will bring us to the CMDB - in the case of the restaurant this will consist of the individual ingredients for the dishes, the pots and pans, the utensils - all the components that are needed to create your meal.

Underpinning the restaurant menu we need to have a Service Level agreement.  In the case of a restaurant this may not be explicitly conveyed in the menu, but you can be assured that the customer will have certain expectations.  No matter how perfect the steak is that you serve to them, if they have had to wait 2 hours for it they will not be happy with the service provided.

Moving back to the IT environment, let’s consider a customer purchasing an email service from their IT Service Provider.  It is not going to be enough to say they want email - where do they want it? Exclusively on their desktop PC? On their laptop in the office or connected to a home network? On a laptop with a roaming wireless connection? On a PDA or mobile phone?  Each of these options will have cost and technical considerations.

Receiving email on a laptop with a roaming wireless connection is going to use more than one underlying technical service and multiple CIs - you will be looking at an Exchange Server, Spam filtering, proxy servers, file storage, back-up services, wireless connectivity, anti virus software, firewall.....the list is long, but the customer does not want, or need to know that.  What they want is spam and virus free email delivered to their laptop wherever they are in the world.

My normal approach is to start looking at the Service Catalogue from a top down view. Define the customer facing services and then start to detail the underlying technical services that make up these services.  The KISS principle should certainly be applied to the creation of a Business Service Catalogue - Keep it simple, stupid, for example, don’t offer your customer virus protection as a Service, that should be an underlying technical service for the email and internet services.

These layers, along with the Service Pipeline and your Retired Services make up the Service Portfolio.

I will talk more about the creation of your Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio in upcoming posts.  In the meantime if you want to see a simple template for a Service Level catalogue, drop me a line at