Esteban wrote an interesting comment in response to my article here
I've always struggled to make sense of this with ITIL. BMC seems to treat the service catalog as a request catalog, though a lot of documentation seems to talk about a service catalog as a service portfolio. It has been difficult for me to bridge the gap elegantly.
I think I can help, but you may not like the answer: BMC's (or HP's) request catalog is not an ITIL Service Catalog.
To refresh, you might want to read these prior notes:
- Gartner Report – Know the Difference between Service Portfolios and Service Catalogs
- What is a service (part 2) Service bundles
In ITIL V3, the term Service Portfolio encompasses all services through the lifecycle: from strategy (what should we do), to design (what are the characteristics of the service to be), to transition (how do put into operations), to operations (how do we manage it, and then retire it). Service Catalog is the "visible part of the service portfolio".
To make this Service Catalog actionable, customers enter into agreements, which expose services to be requested. This latter part is the requestable part of the catalog and would consist of the "viewable" and "requestable" services.
And Esteban, you are not the only one confused. The people who wrote the Service Operations book, where Service Fulfillment is located (where is Service Request?@!) refer to the ability to give the user a "menu" of options. Boy do they twist themselves to avoid using the word catalog! But in fact it's a catalog of service requests that need to be connected to the Service Portfolio.
That's why you are confused. Hopefully this helped a bit.
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