10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 10

And here is the final one!  Next week we are back to our regular postings.

For the next two weeks, we are going to publish our 10 best practices for the service catalog request portal every single day.  Then they'll disappear for a two months (why?  because our book publisher is not entirely comfortable with giving away valuable articles.)  My recommendation?  Subscribe to this blog  with this icon   and you won't miss a thing.

10. Keep it fresh! Make the Service Catalog easy to update by the service owners.

Just as your IT services change, so will your Service Catalog content. The number and variety of IT services has increased exponentially with the rise of client/server applications, the expansion of networking options, the rise of the internet, mobile and wireless connectivity – continued change and growth in these IT services is inevitable.

In our experience at newScale, we find that the number of IT service request variations (including moves, adds, and changes) typically ranges from one hundred to several hundred. Over time, the range of IT services and the volume of service requests will continue to grow. Additionally, service expectations change over time; so there will always be variations driven by technology change, competitors, and economic or regulatory volatility.

Managing content in your Service Catalog is critical:

• Make it easy to update. Provide tools that allow service managers or service owners to keep their services fresh. Change will happen, and you don’t want bottlenecks to keep your Service Catalog from being fresh. Flexible and codeless (i.e., no programming required) service design tools are extremely important for keeping the total cost of ownership under control.

• Have a well-defined workflow for changing processes. Your Service Catalog strategy should include clear roles, functions and queues for managing large scale changes to service request processes as they appear in the catalog.