Service Catalogs

ITIL v3: Utility and Warranty - two sides of the same coin « ITIL Blues

I'm always looking for a metaphor to explain Utility and Warranty.  I like this one from ITIL Blues.

For example, if I go to a hairdresser to get a haircut (the Utility being the haircut service; it could also include shaving or hair dying) I’ll certainly will be expecting that:

   1. It won’t take too long to get my hair cut
   2. My head suffers no harm
   3. I have a comfortable chair
   4. and so on…

All these build up my perception of “how the service is being delivered” - the Warranty.

Link: ITIL v3: Utility and Warranty - two sides of the same coin « ITIL Blues.

itSMF ITILV3 Overview

If you can't afford the ITIL v3 books. Or don't want to read all the books at their glorious $450.00 cost. ITSMf UK has published a nice primer subset.

It can be found here. (Warning: PDF coming)  itSMF_ITILV3_Intro_Overview.pdf

Today is the day that changes the service catalog industry

Many of you know me from the blog, classes, conferences, or the book.  But as CTO of newScale (aka my day job), building software that improves people's lives and makes organizations work better is my passion.  Normally I don't talk about products in this blog, but today we have made big announcement and I'm super excited.   So I beg your leave, and for a moment, allow me to communicate my excitement about this announcement.

We are introducing the newScale FrontOffice suite!  This release includes dozens of pre-defined ITIL roles for all of the processes that link to the IT Service Catalog. It also provides new software functionality to activate these ITIL processes across the entire service lifecycle - including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continual service improvement.  There's a lot more(see press release for everything else)

One of my favorites new products in the suite is the newScale Organization Designer(tm). 

Everyone knows one of the painful parts of implementing ITIL or any process framework is  defining the roles, the processes those roles participate in and the capabilities and tools those roles need to do their job.

Sometimes this falls under the rubric of cultural change;  except it's often about changing daily practices as much as attitudes. Tools are needed to support and enforce the new daily practices brought about by new processes. I believe good, elegant tools help change attitudes; it's hard to get excited about change when it looks the same as yesterday.

So where does Organizational design play with the catalog?  Let me give you a scenario from a real customer example: this customer has 12 distinct business units, several hundred business services in the portfolio, each supported by various request fulfillment processes.  Then add a dozen of Relationship managers, several hundred service agreements, five IT organizations, 25 service areas (servers, network, etc) across 3 continents covering 150,000 employees and you get a flavor of the complexity.  Each agreement drives the availability of different potential service requests with different approval chains. This is highly complex environment, changes daily and needs to be made an operational and recurrent.

A static document for a catalog is not even feasible for this customer; the catalog has to support all the different players, each needing a different view to do their job. (See dynamic catalogs)

So, we have created the newScale Organizational Designer, a tool to model your organization al structures, accounts, roles, positions, hierarchies, and groups. Then we have pre-populated it with a core set of roles and job descriptions from ITIL V3 Processes such as "Catalog management," "Portfolio Designer," "Service Level Manager," etc.   

Pretty cool, no?  But this is where it gets real good.  We also included a whole set of the core processes and activities that support the work of these roles according to ITIL v3, such as "Add a new service to the catalog" and provide the supporting software functionality (portals, screens, etc) to manage the specific activities for these roles. 

Finally, to roll out this model out operationally and actionably it ties to the directory systems, security and single sign on automatically.  In essence, Organizational Designer helps Activate ITIL. By providing a complete framework for pre-packaged roles, processes, capabilities and integration, you truly can design your organization.  There are dozens of roles, dozens of processes, hundreds of services, a slew of business units, and each needs to get their own view to the services that are available to them. 

For example, say you want the network group to maintain only the technical part of their services, and finance to  do the price modeling, but leave the  service owner to assemble the customer facing business service?  And you want a control process for any changes to the published catalog? That's what Organization Designer does.

I'm very proud of our newScale product team; they really have changed the game in the service catalog and service portfolio market.  Tomorrow I will discuss our new Catalog Foundation and Service Designer, which is truly awesome.

Here's the newScale Press Release.

 

ITIL v3 is bigger, brawnier, overwhelming

This maps to concerns I have heard about ITIL V3: it's overwhelming.

Distressed ITIL Trainers I am seeing quite a few messages in which very proficient ITIL trainers pour out their concerns regarding the delivery of ITIL v3 courses.

At the time of writing the only course that is being discussed is the v3 Foundation program and the concerns go along the following lines...

I've been an ITIL trainer for x years; but with v3 I am really worried that there is too much material to cover and the concepts are far too detailed for a Foundation level program.

Link: ITSM View.

There are, what, 22 processes?  Over 32,000 bullet points of text (I stopped counting after 32,443).  So there's no way that a foundation course can meaningfully and usefully cover all of ITIL V3. 

What we need, and I believe will happen, is a role or job description view of ITIL.  So if you are creating a service catalog, you can understand the core related processes, roles and activities.  No more.  This is a case of less information is better.

 

Service Catalogs: ITIL V3 readings, part 1

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:

1. Gartner Report – Know the Difference between Service Portfolios and Service Catalogs
2. 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.

What does blow up mean?

I've been reading the ITIL v3 books. It seems that the CMDB is now blown up. What does that mean?
It means that there are many new sources of truth beyond the CMDB. Here are some from the ITIL V3 books:

The Service Portfolio is the main source of information on the requirements and services and needs to be very carefully designed to meet all the needs of all its users. The design of the Service Portfolio needs to be considered in the same way as the design of any other IT service to ensure that it meets all of these needs. This approach should also be used for all of the other Service Management information systems, including the:

    * Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS)
    * Configuration Management (CMS)
    * Service Desk system
    * Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)
    * Availability Management Information System (AMIS)
    * Security Management Information System (SMIS)
    * Supplier and Contracts Database (SCD).

This is what I mean by blown up:  The notion of one ring to rule them all is dead.  One CMDB that has all the data is dead.