Today Jack Probst presented to the itSMF Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The presentation is to be posted on the SIG web site. The CMDB and the service catalog are very closely related. The CMDB starts with services anyways, and the service catalog is the list of services. Potential service catalog categories:

• Application Based Services (e.g. Customer Support Services)
• Hosting Services (e.g. Data Center services)
• Desktop Services (e.g. mobile devices)
• Shared Services (e.g. data LAN)
• IT Professional Services (e.g. Service Management, Procurement)

The itSMF Special Interest Group (SIG) for Higher Education is going to have its next event, June 17. It doesn't look like the SIG's web site is updated yet, so here are the details:

Speaker
Jack Probst, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant

WHEN:
Wednesday, June 17th, 1:00-2:00 pm EDT

COST:
Free

REGISTRATION

We have several means for learning about ITSM: books, training, user groups like the itSMF, fellow Universities, and sites like this one. Last Friday I explored another means: I talked with a Gartner analyst for the first time. If your University has a contract with Gartner, then the odds are someone on campus has the ability to schedule 30-minute calls with a Gartner analyst. There are over 600 Gartner analysts.

I talked with someone from the "CIO Research" team, a team of 20 people. The analyst point me to some case studies supporting our service catalog implementation and helped me understand the value of a Business Service Catalog. He said that it's not uncommon to schedule several calls with the same analyst to "follow up" and see how things are going.

Below are notes from today's itSMF USA Higher Education SIG round table conversation.

I just watched the NewScale webinar on service request fulfillment. The presentation helped explain the connection between service catalogs and request fulfillment, and was intended for people already familiar with ITIL v3 concepts.

The bulk of the presentation was Rodrigo Flores, founder and CTO of newScale, talking about the "eleven secrets of successful service request fulfillment." These 11 tips are very specific to how you deploy a web-based portal that allows end users to order services themselves.

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).

In Computerworld Magazine, Paul Ingevaldson recently wrote an article called "Top 10 qualities of a great IT shop." These qualities include the CIO reporting to the CEO, an executive steering committee, and a focus on the software development lifecycle.

A couple of the qualities relate to ITIL, such as having a security team (loosely Security Management), a disaster recovery process (IT Service Continuity Management), SDLC focus (very loosely Service Design), and participating in the long-range planning (Service Strategy).

The list looks OK to me, so I'm wondering: why don't ITIL concepts show up more often in Paul's list? Here are my guesses:

The July itSMF USA e-newsletter linked to some useful articles. itSMF USA members can subscribe to this newsletter. These two articles are especially relevant for us right now:

I just added links to a few EDUCAUSE presentations on ITIL and change management, and also linked to a few Universities' service catalogs.

Prerequisites/Before You Begin

The service catalog should be a list of operational services--the services that already exist. The service catalog and the "service pipeline"--or list of services that are in planning to be created--together create the "service portfolio." The service pipeline and service portfolio are discussed in ITIL v3's "Service Strategy."

Service Catalog Management

Here's ITIL's definition of a "service:"