Service Integration and Management

BUSINESS SERVICE CATALOGUE

What is a Service Catalogue

As a service provider, you want to make it as clear as possible to your customers, what the services you provide are about. Customers should be guided through the forest of service offerings.

For example: Onboarding a new employee requires multiple disciplines within your organization to fulfil tasks. You don't want your customers to figure out by themselves what to do with HR, and which portal to use at IT. A service Catalogue will inform people about the onboarding process and guide them through the process. Additionally, all services linked in the onboarding process are linked together into a service chain.

Service Catalogue

A Service Catalogue is a bundle of service definitions, setting the boundaries of what can be expected from a service and against which cost the service is provided. The Service Catalogue should be dynamic, as services also change regularly due to new business requirements. Ideally a service catalogue is a hierarchical structure of services, with business services mentioned on top. The lower you navigate through the hierarchy the more technical services will become. A well-defined service catalogue gives insights in which technical services are required to enable which business process.

With the SMTX Business Service Catalogue solution maintenance and publication of a Service Catalogue is simplified. SMTX assures that all service descriptions have the same quality level and informs Service and Catalogue Owners about changes effecting their services or the overall quality of the service chains.

Many organization have taken the effort to compose a service catalogue, but fail in maintaining it in accordance with reality. That is generally caused by the way such a catalog is offered. When written in a text editor and published as PDF, maintenance can only be done by people having access to the source file. This is inefficient and is the perfect recipe for getting stuck with a catalogue that doesn’t represent reality. The result will be that neither customer nor service providers know exactly what is within scope of each service.

The Service sandwich

About 5-10 years ago, IT departments were managing all IT services internally. External service providers were often limited to infrastructure providers like Telco companies and hardware support contracts. Today, IT departments have outsourced large number of services to external providers, make use of numerous Cloud services and are forced to not only focus on their own level of service delivery, but also on that of their service providers. At SMTX we call that the Service sandwich. In order to deliver great service to your business customer, you need to be in control of the full service chain underneath each of the delivered services.

At SMTX we deliver software solutions that enable organizations to act as a true service broker and make that Service sandwich tastes great!

Service Catalogue definition

A restaurant is not able to improve dishes without knowing it’s suppliers and knowing how ingredients are grown and delivered. The same counts for IT organizations. As a service broker you need to spend time in defining your Business Service Catalogue. With that, it becomes clear which vendors contribute to which business process and what Service Levels have been agreed with all providers across the chain. The software of SMTX helps with this administration and assigns services to Service Owners for maintenance. Find below more information about the SMTX Business Service Catalogue solution and how this solution helps with Service Integration and Management.