Last year, we decided to create a service catalog for our department. The purpose of this catalog was to get a central list of the services that people in the department support. Thus, we were creating a technical service catalog (where the audience is internal IT staff and IT management) rather than a business service catalog (where the audience is end-users and other departments). We led several workshops with groups in the department to come up with our service catalog listings. We used a Google Docs spreadsheet to record services and to provide people with a form for submitting services. Our goal was to capture everything that might be a service--to be overly inclusive, rather than to miss something. We also decided on a two-tier approach: services would be grouped into "service categories." We collected very little data on each service. Even now, when we have collected additional fields from people, 80% of the value of the catalog is just that it lists our services. We then created a Microsoft Word catalog, one page per entry, and used MS Word headings to identify each service and category. MS Word's "table of contents" feature then created our service catalog list. This approach is definitely sub-optimal, but it had two things going for it:
Over time we have used this list for several things, including our Remedy change request category/type/item values, our capital planning process, and a survey to groups in our department to understand what services are taking most of our time. By integrating the catalog in this way, we have ensured that it stays accurate--if someone notices that a service is missing, we can update the tools and the source catalog. We have since deleted several entries that didn't seem to be "services," such as a "Software Development" service. We do software development, but it seemed better suited to be an attribute on other service entries (e.g. "Service X: software development IS/IS NOT performed.") We have also added several dozen services we missed initially, and re-grouped services into new service categories. We are now moving towards a better format for the catalog, on a dynamic web site that allows workflow for publishing catalog entries. However, if I had to do it over again I'd say we should create the catalog exactly the same way next time. Getting the technology out of the way, and focusing on the catalog contents (be it a MS word document or sheets of paper) is what adds value. Individual site contributors are solely responsible for the content of this web site.
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