Service Catalog Community and Blog

A Cautionary Tale: Will Provision for Food?

Steve loves servers. He hugs them. He talks to them. He says they talk back in their strange whirring language. He patches their ouchies. He keeps them cool and feeds them only the cleanest electricity money can buy.

Then changes started. The CIO said, "People, our customers want us to be as easy to do business as that Amazon cloud thingie or they are gonna do it themselves."

Customer said we want standard configurations. Steve said custom engineering.

They wanted a self-service catalog. Steve wanted long meetings and complex spreadsheets because no one understood his art..

They said deliver in minutes not months. Steve said, fill my 15 page change management worksheet and I'll get back in a couple of weeks or so.

They wanted to manage the lifecycle themselves, Steve said, "You will pry my servers from my cold dead hands."

Management obliged.

Steve is now available if your servers need hugging.

ITIL v3 Service Catalogue Certification

ITIL v3 Service Catalogue Certification.

Official ITIL v3 Certification for Service Catalogue Webinar with APMG, Pink Elephant, and newScale

APMG, Pink Elephant and newScale recently announced the new ITIL v3 Service Catalogue training qualification - approved with independent review by itSMF International. What does this new qualification mean for you? How will this help you attain ITIL v3 credits and achieve ITIL Expert Certification? Register for this Webinar and find out.

No Catalog, No Cloud

Cloud computing is an operational model built on top of virtualization.  This operational models depends on:
1) Standardization of configurations
2) Clear offerings for environments
3) Clear resource and workload definitions
4) A self-service configuration system for customers
5) Lifecycle management by customers (what's on, what needs to go off, change, etc)
6) Basic resource accounting and charge back
7) Service level reporting.

When you put it all together, you have defined a service catalog.  So if you are starting with virtualization on your way to offer an internal or private cloud... remember:  No catalog, No cloud.

Employees: The Direct Route to Customers' Hearts - ITIL

I call this the mirror effect. Or the business version of the golden rule. Treat your service people right and they'll treat your customers right.  But specifically it says this: 

Research involving more than 30,000 customer service employees conducted earlier this year by the Corporate Executive Board indicates that there is a close connection between employees' work experience and customer opinions. Departments where employees reported they had the authority to take actions to meet customer needs, make decisions on their own to improve quality, and respond to problems without waiting for approval had the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

Which I have always believed technology can help with, but so often it's used for exactly the opposite: control for the sake of control, rules for the sake of rules.

Yet, this is why I got excited about self-service request catalog... if you are going to standardize and not let me negotiate, at least make it easy and predictable for me to deal with you. 

And by the way, there's nothing soft about the profit impact.

The study also discovered that even a small change in employees' ability to get the job done for customers can yield big dividends. Improving the percentage of employees who reported they had the ability to easily correct customers' problems by just 5 percentage points yielded a 10% increase in customer satisfaction.

Employees: The Direct Route to Customers' Hearts - BusinessWeek.

Emergent Consensus: Private Cloud Needs a Front Office Part 1

Last week I attended Structure 09, one of the better cloud computing conferences. Everyone I could hear the echo of the need for a service catalog; often it was implicit.

For example, everyone spoke about the need for standardization and multi-tenancy, about the need to abstract computing resources from the application to enable moving workloads as needed.  Which in my mind requires you to a) know what the workload is, b) know the SLA of that workload, c) have well defined underpinning technical services that compose that application service, and therefore d) Have a SERVICE CATALOG to track all of that!

And so a consensus begins to form. I'll track that on my blog.  First up, is a Sandhill article on how to take the next step up from virtualization to a private cloud.
 

Turning Your Virtual Datacenter Environment into an Internal Cloud

Introducing processes and tools that are similar to those provided by external cloud vendors can turn your virtual datacenter environment into an internal cloud.

By first developing [editor note: or acquire?]  tools to handle life cycle management of virtual machines, a user can request a virtual machine using a menu to specify resource requirements (CPUs, memory, storage), operating system details, lease period (no more than 12 months) and other miscellaneous configuration information.

The request then goes through an IT approval process, that once approved, is assigned and the virtual machine is rapidly provisioned from templates. A requisition process that used to take weeks is now completed in just days and urgent requests can be handled within hours. To further avoid server sprawl problems and to maximize resource utilization for legitimate purposes, it is recommended that the virtual machines either get a lease extension in three month increments or are retired when a lease period expires.

SandHill.com | Opinion : Building an Internal Cloud.

It's worth commenting on the lifecycle. I'll do that in future blog posts.

Federal CIO: "Make IT 'Storefront' A Reality With Service Catalogs" ITIL

Federal CIO totally gets it.

For large enterprises, the procurement of IT hardware, software, and services is in desperate need of an overhaul. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra would like to see the GSA provide a central location for ordering these services, and eventually to move its IT procurement processes away from schedules and toward what he calls a "storefront" model.

The vision is simple. Agencies buy IT products and services with the same ease of online shopping.

Kundra’s vision should be a model for all IT organizations and the reality of self-service IT is here today. Consumers have become experts using online shopping sites like Amazon.com and eBay , and as corporate users they are starting to questions why they can’t have this same experience ordering IT services.

Tracking status, speeding delivery time, bundling options together (recommended by your profile) and getting automated approval will be the next major wave of innovation in corporate IT. What this really means is self-service IT.

Make IT 'Storefront' A Reality With Service Catalogs - Analytics - InformationWeek.

Show me the ROI! Show.Me.The.ROI!! ITIL Service Catalog Payback Exposed

I get this question a lot: what is the ROI on a service catalog.  Recently, Manny and Chip asked it on our community group.   Here's an excerpt from my answer.

There's absolutely ROI from implementing a service catalog tool set which always includes process automation I have less insight about the paper kind.

In my business, we often have to help our customers assemble business cases for customers. These can be light during good times or they can be large enough to stun an ox during bad times. It also varies with the organization: some are very, very good at doing pre- and post- ; others less so. My colleagues and I sometimes have spent weeks interviewing people and gathering data; and it's often surprising to a customer what we find...

So where's the magic happen? From the same place all process re-engineering improvements come and some less familiar. Here are a few:

Self-service eliminates a large number of calls (30% to 70% depending on client). The number of requests seems small compared to calls, but anywhere from a few to over 12 calls are follow up calls for status.

Guided configuration and entitlement management reduces configuration engineering. Smart forms reduce errors and filling time. Example, at TV network it took about a dozen back and forth e-mails/calls to properly fill out a form. One call was to HR to just verify that a) you existed, and b) who you said your boss was, really was.

Approvals help reduce maverick spending.

Standardization of delivery reduces re-work.

Automated workflow eliminates manual activities, and helps you "lean" the process. Many steps can disappear because they are really about information updating and communication. The catalog system does that.

Pricing and showback (not chargeback) help...

The rest can be found in the thread at the LinkedIn forum

Service Catalog 101: Introducing a New Blog From my Colleagues at newScale

At newScale, if may toot our horn for a bit, we've forgotten more about service catalogs that most other companies can put together.  Those are BIG words, and I am going to back them up!

Except, I'm not doing it alone. There are many talented people at newScale who know more than I do. And we now have their voices joining the conversation; I'd like to introduce you to Service Catalog 101.a new blog that hosts many of my colleagues at newScale.

There you can catch articles, such a A Portfolio of Confusion (part 1), or
7 things ITSM vendors don't want you to know about their Service Catalog tools

Enjoy.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 9

It's Thursday, Martes, Donnerstag, 木曜日, Четверг -- ready for Number 9.  It has pigs, lipstick and bad judgement. hmm.

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.

9. Don’t put lipstick on a pig! Take care of the back end integration.

There’s no point in putting up a Service Catalog that is not integrated with the back-end service delivery, or that doesn’t provide and track real estimates for service delivery. The most common mistake is to create a service request form that simply generates an e-mail to someone – or an online Service Catalog that simply documents the service description and provides the email contact information. This often fails because it ends up being a constant source of maintenance (hence costly) and it doesn’t help manage either customer expectations or service delivery.

Some tips for avoiding this mistake:

• Ensure seamless integration with the back-end. The Service Catalog should be able to integrate with the myriad of different back-end systems in your company, including your directory, enterprise portal, help desk system, procurement system, asset database, and configuration management database (CMDB). This can typically be addressed by leveraging packaged Service Catalog and Request Management software with a robust integration framework and pre-built adapters.

• Develop integrated service plans. Bundling is a powerful concept for simplifying the Request Management experience. The back-end construct of bundling requires a workflow to manage the “manufacturing” of the service tasks spanning people, departments and systems. This removes the need for personnel to manually shepherd requests – these savings alone provide the hard dollar ROI to justify the entire Service Catalog deployment.

• Manage the end-to-end service. Roll up estimates for delivery from multiple systems real time, and communicate those estimates through your Service Catalog. This allows you to manage customer expectations and notify them of changes.

Troy's update: Extra Extra Official ITIL Certification for Service Catalog

“The Service Catalog - Cornerstone of IT Service Management”

Having just landed from our 3 week PinkPERSPECTIVE tour (and boy my arms are tired) I would like to comment about the exciting news on the ITIL education front that broke on Monday of this week.

Since the launch of the ITIL v3 certification model two years ago we have heard of the coming introduction of accredited course offerings recognized by the owners of ITIL as “complementary guidance.”

The concept of recognized and accredited courses that provide specific and targeted knowledge on key subjects makes a lot of sense for individuals who have a specific role to play within an IT Service Management context or are tasked with the design and deployment of a focused element of ITSM practices.

troysblog.

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.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 7

Back to our regular programming. Have a nice Tuesday!, Martes!, Dienstag! Mardi! 火曜日! &! 星期二! Martedì! 화요일!!  Terça-feira! вторник!  That's just a few of the countries visiting this blog -- it doesn't include the UK. Ireleand, Scotland, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand -- welcome!

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.

7. Stuff happens! Make it easy to deal with breakdowns and exceptions.

Regardless of how well you do, or intend to do, breakdowns happen. Sometimes those are easy enough to correct, other times they are not.

• Focus on service quality. Would any manufacturing company make a product without having quality assurance, return, support and credit processes? No, and neither can a service organization. Master the three key processes for service delivery: a) the process by which you “manufacture” the service itself; b) the process by which you deal with breakdowns in the delivery of the service; and c) the process by which you redress or “make good” on any failure.

• Allow for exception requests. Regardless of how good your Service Catalog is, how complete your catalog is, or how thorough your order forms are, they can’t account for everything a user may request. A easy way out: put a service called "I didn't find what I was looking for"

APM Group Announcement of ITIL Service Catalog Certification

Here's the official link and an excerpt quoting yours truly.

Service Catalogue is a new qualification that looks at new ways to control demand, publish and track service pricing and cost, and automate service request management and fulfilment. Service Catalogue also looks at ways to help reduce cycle time. Implementing workflow can reduce the time it takes to fulfil services, saving numerous hours per request. Organizations can thus reallocate precious staff time to more strategic initiatives.

Rodrigo Flores, CTO and Founder of newScale says "The Service Catalogue is the engine that drives IT Service Management and we are delighted to support the launch of a global certification programme establishing professional credential for this core process. Based on our experience, organisations are saving millions of dollars a year through effective Service Catalogue and this will be critical for organisations as we move out of recession."

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 8

Here's number 8.  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.

8. Let them know how great you are doing! Provide a service dashboard.

Providing dashboards for business managers is the best way to create a shared understanding and ownership for IT services. By using honest metrics that matter to these stakeholders – e.g., how often does the manufacturing group request a particular IT service – they become partners in service delivery. The key is to replace anecdotal word-of-mouth with factual metrics available at their fingertips.

Here are some recommendations incorporating a dashboard into your Service Catalog:

• Publish meaningful metrics. Metrics should be in the language of the customer, and they should be relevant to the behavior. Metrics such as system uptime, call volumes, etc. are not particularly meaningful to business stakeholders. Metrics such as how frequently you delivered on the promised delivery time for on-boarding a new employee are very meaningful.

• Let them see the behavior of their team. What are the top ten service requests? What is the average approval time for a service request? What costs are they incurring? This data is easy to get by using an actionable Service Catalog, yet today it is often impossible.

• Market your performance. Again, the perception and expectation of service quality are tied together. Set simple metrics in your service level agreements (e.g., the estimated time to deliver each service), track your performance against those metrics, and publish those results in the Service Catalog portal. In doing so, you can create the perception – and the reality – of reliability.

• Dashboards should be short and to the point. Don’t overwhelm your stakeholders with lots of useless data – if they ask for more, great! But keep it short and simple. Think of it as publishing a short newspaper on a daily basis.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 6

It's a holiday in the U.S. -- Labor Day. But here is part 6.  For the next two weeks, I am 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.

6. Make it fun! An educated customer self-regulates behavior.

Fun is an important part of the service experience. People pay more and are more satisfied when they enjoy themselves. Seems obvious, no? But applying this to IT and services seems counter-intuitive and difficult to sell to top management. Here’s why it should be considered: you will increase use of the Service Catalog, you will reduce the number of complaints, you will reduce the number of fires and emergencies and you will reduce rework. Remember, customer satisfaction is set by reliability, but also by empathy, understanding, courtesy, credibility and competence. Here are ways to make “fun” a serious endeavor.

Some suggestions for inserting fun into IT service requests:

• Let them see how you “manufacture” the service. Letting your internal customers understand the “manufacturing” tasks makes them more knowledgeable and sympathetic with your delivery process. This can be accomplished by giving them a view of the workflow tasks involved in their unique request.

• Give them choices. People love shopping and having choices. So why not give them meaningful options for their services? Simple things that don’t cost a thing include the ability to schedule a convenient time for a move or having multiple choices for a service. If you use the right Service Catalog software, this is easy and cost-effective. The result: people take much more responsibility for their choices.

• Give your service personnel autonomy. Having autonomy is not contradictory to having processes and standards. In fact, by having standard processes in place, you should be able to grant more autonomy to service personnel. This prevents centralized mistakes from spreading to every facet of your business.

Official ITIL Certification for Service Catalog Education Launched Today

Today, APM Group, with the support of newScale, Pink Elephant and endorsed by the International Qualifications Committee of itSMF® International (itSMFI), are announcing the development of a new, stand-alone certification for IT practitioners interested in the creation and maintenance of a best practice Service Catalog.  This will become a new international certification based on IP from newScale and Pink Elephant. 

In short, Service Catalog education now is a formal part of the ITIL qualification scheme.

As I have been writing for a while on this blog, the service catalog is the spine of ITIL, touching all the major processes.  Yet there has been a lack of guidance and know how. Many people think it's just a listing of what they do. So in 2005, I started the first service catalog course and encouraged other training organizations to do the same.  Pink Elephant took the call and co-developed a course they offer; it also led to co-authoring our book, Defining IT Success Through the Service Catalog. 

Other training and consulting organizations followed.  Yet many of them as well as the practitioner community asked how this courses fit within the ITIL qualification scheme. So about a year ago, we started the process of creating a formal certification and test for Service Catalog practitioners.  Today, that plan becomes true. 

This summer, a full and rigorous accreditation process will take place, involving independent trial deliveries of a Service Catalog course that will cover the key learning requirements Pink Elephant and newScale have identified. Once the Service Catalog certification scheme is finalized and released in September 2009, authorized training organizations (ATOs) may then develop and submit their own training materials for accreditation.

Here's an excerpt from the APM press release

APMG-International to launch new Complementary Qualification

APMG-International (APMG) High Wycombe, UK announces the release of a Qualification for Service Catalogue. The qualification initiated by market leaders newScale, headquartered in San Francisco and Pink Elephant in Toronto, Canada, has been developed over the last several months and is the second complimentary qualification for the ITIL Qualification Portfolio.
The Service Catalogue qualification was subject to independent review and scrutiny by the International Qualifications Committee of itSMF International, the leading Service Management movement with 52 different Chapters.

Colin Rudd, itSMFI Director of Professional Qualifications and Certifications said, “The importance of an accurate Service Catalogue cannot be underestimated. Candidates can now gain a recognized qualification in this discipline whilst working towards their ITIL Expert Certification.”
Service Catalogue is a new qualification that looks at new ways to control demand, publish and track service pricing and cost, and automate service request management and fulfilment. Service Catalogue also looks at ways to help reduce cycle time. Implementing workflow can reduce the time it takes to fulfil services, saving numerous hours per request. Organizations can thus reallocate precious staff time to more strategic initiatives.

Rodrigo Flores, CTO and Founder of newScale says “The Service Catalogue is the engine that drives IT Service Management and we are delighted to support the launch of a global certification programme establishing professional credential for this core process. Based on our experience, organisations are saving millions of dollars a year through effective Service Catalogue and this will be critical for organisations as we move out of recession.”

AVP of Product Strategy at Pink Elephant, Troy DuMoulin says, “Having spent many years teaching and assisting organizations in adopting IT Service Management, we’re pleased to be associated with the launch of this new certification. Our experience and client feedback confirms that the Service Catalogue is the cornerstone of any ITIL initiative. We’re encouraged by this exciting development in the professionalism of Service Management.”

Richard Pharro, CEO of APM Group says, “We are thrilled to have been chosen by newScale and PINK to take over the Service Catalogue Certification and to create an international standard for one of the key tools in service management.”

Sharon Taylor, ITIL V3 Chief Examiner says, “qualifications which help further promote specialized knowledge from within ITIL practices will be a welcomed addition to the overall Qualifcation Scheme. We are pleased to continue to offer more choices for ITIL certification.”

The qualification will be developed over the next few months and will be trialled by Global Knowledge, headquartered in Cary, N.C, and PINK Elephant. APMG-International will be inviting training companies to apply for accreditation from September 2009 and, having gone through the rigorous assessment process for which APMG is known, they expect to have a number of training providers active in the market place in the last quarter 2009, first quarter 2010.

The APM Group’s role as OGC’s official accreditor for the ITIL Qualification scheme allows us to license other Examination Institutes to administer ITIL qualification and accreditation activities.

Further, the new course will qualify for 1.5 ITIL V3 credits, and will become only the 2nd course recognized in ITIL V3’s Complementary Guidance, a selection of best practice courses intended to supplement the content that currently exists in ITIL V3’s core portfolio of examinations and certifications.

The detailed Certification Scheme will be developed over the next few months and the qualification will be trialed by Global Knowledge, headquartered in Cary, N.C, and PINK Elephant. APM Group will be inviting training companies to apply for accreditation from September 2009 and, having gone through the rigorous assessment process for which APM Group is known, they expect to have a number of training providers active in the market place in the last quarter 2009, first quarter 2010.
 

The newScale press release is here, and the Pink Elephant press release says,
"APMG Approves Development Of New ITIL Certification; Accepts Proposal From Pink Elephant & newScale Inc."  here.

We'll be doing some sessions to introduce this to the ITSM community at the upcoming ITSMF in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries.

It's the end of a long journey, but also the beginning of a new profession, Service Catalog Manager.

What's the Cost of Building a Whole IT Front Office Suite?

Buid your own service catalog toolset or acquire one? Hmm... Let's look at the cost, with HUMOR!! All kidding aside, either the menu is a piece of paper or it's an operating model... Which one do you think it is?

When it Comes to Service Portfolio Management, I'll Have What She is Having.

My product managers are having way too much fun.... Check it out

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 5

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.

5. Under promise and over deliver! Manage expectations to reduce fire-fighting.

Satisfaction and quality are the assessments people make between their expectations for a service and their perception of the service performance. You can be satisfied with a $5.00 burger at McDonalds, while another might be dissatisfied with a $100 meal at a four star restaurant – different expectations lead to different perceptions. The typical breakdown for IT service organizations: expectations for a service are not set appropriately.

To effectively manage expectations:

• Be explicit on dates. This is tough for IT service delivery, so establish upfront three key dates you will track: expected date, estimated date and actual date. These are your key dates for managing the requests.

• Own the promise for the whole of the experience. The customer judges their satisfaction based on the whole package, not from a task or function. Ensure that you are clear about what it takes to fulfill the entire service request process, not just the initial task.

• Close the loop. Don’t just complete tasks, inform the user of the status and ask for an evaluation. Make sure the communication links back to the requisition and the Service Catalog so the user can clearly navigate from notification to requisition.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. Number 4

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.

4. People love UPS tracking! Use it to reduce help calls by 30 - 50%.

The single biggest frustration for your customers is that they don’t know what is going on, when their request is going to be fulfilled, and what needs to happen to get their service.

Deal with this problem and people will think you are a service star (and reduce calls to the help desk by 30-50%). Not being able to predict delivery timeframes and not knowing the status causes frustration and creates direct economic costs in the form of back-and-forth status calls, over-ordering, emergency expenditures and maverick service requests. Without clear dates, commitments, and valid status, end users are forced to wait – impacting their productivity.

Here are some tips for status tracking:

• Provide visibility for all processes. Like UPS, you should provide insight throughout the service request cycle. This means you need visibility to your authorization process, your delivery process, your outsourced processes, and your cross-system processes. This is achievable today by using Service Catalog software with a modern enterprise integration framework.

• Use rich e-mails. People love to be in control. The right e-mail, at the right moment, with the proper information, formatted professionally, let’s them know you are in control, and their request is under control.

• Provide a “receipt” not just a tracking number. A web page for ordering services is not sufficient if the customer has no meaningful record of their request, the services ordered and the dates expected.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. No. 3

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.

3. Help the customer help you!

End users don’t usually complain that they have to fill out service request forms in the first place – but they certainly don’t like having their request returned/rejected, or the service not delivered because the form wasn’t filled out correctly. The second biggest gripe is that they need to fill out too many forms with the same information to request what they view as one service.

Look at it from their perspective and you will see that they think in “whole experiences”, very much like ordering a “#1” at McDonald’s. Here are some key suggestions for making request forms easy-to-use:

• Use “English” in your form. Service request forms are hard to understand because they use technical language with which the user is not familiar. Design forms that ask simple questions in common business and consumer-oriented language.

• Design intelligent, interactive forms. Use look-ups and pick lists, with integration into existing systems to minimize entry errors and user frustration. If you can look up live data to pre-fill the form fields, it’s even better.

• Re-use common elements. Don’t ask the user to fill out the same information multiple times. Create a common dictionary and content system. While this is an obvious practice in large-scale software development, service request forms often don’t have common elements in a library that can be re-used.

10 best practices for the service request catalog. Number 2

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.

2. Merchandise, sell and cross sell!

Your users are all familiar with e-commerce shopping sites: use that to your advantage. Market your services. Whether for installing a PC, granting access to a server, adding a report to an application, or setting up a new employee, all of these items should be in your Service Catalog.

Here are some recommendations for marketing these services:

• Use merchandise “bundling” to remove complexity. For example, a “New Engineer Setup” should include all the sub-services a new engineer needs to work, while “Move an Employee” will require coordination across a variety of different tasks in the right order.

• Don’t skimp on content. Explain the service and educate your consumer on exactly what they are getting. No one uses Amazon.com because of their part number system. It’s their integrated content experience with reviews, comments, and graphics that provide a context to help people order. This also improves ordering, reduces returns (complaints), and eliminates rework.

• Cross-sell. Using the Dell.com model for PC configuration, let them configure their service and submit a request with the options and service levels that they are entitled to – based on well-defined standardized service components. While it may sound counter-intuitive, cross-selling and promotion techniques ensure more complete requests that decrease the need for clarification call-backs. By helping the user understand his or her choices and all the optional elements the first time, you can reduce the need for additional approvals and multiple dispatches.

• IT services aren’t free. Define how your IT services are billed or allocated, and include that information in the Service Catalog. Let your users know that services come at a ‘price’, even if you don’t use chargebacks. By simply assigning a price to the request, you can regulate the consumption of expensive IT services.

World Exclusive Interview - Blog - ServiceSphere

World Exclusive Interview - Blog - ServiceSphere.

The IT Skeptic sits down with ServiceSphere to talk, rant and inform on IT Service Management!

10 best practices for the service request catalog. Number 1

For the next two weeks, we are going to re-publish our 10 best practices for the service catalog request portal every single day. 

My recommendation?  Subscribe to this blog  with this icon   and you won't miss a thing.

1. Make it easy to find!
The Service Catalog is not effective unless the requesters actually use it – otherwise, they will pick up
the phone and continue to make expensive calls to the help desk. You need to design it with the objective of encouraging adoption and usage from the outset. When it comes to user adoption, you can apply the best practices of media and online commerce companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. You need to create something compelling and unique to entice users to adopt the Service Catalog and move to self-service.

The key is to implement what we at newScale call “YADU”:
• Yahoo-like search and categorization;
• Amazon–like merchandising;
• Dell-like configuration; and
• UPS-like tracking for services.

By following the YADU model, your IT organization will help to ensure adoption, alleviate challenges in
finding services, and reduce your user training costs. IT’s internal customers will intuitively understand how to navigate and use your Service Catalog because it’s designed in a familiar model that they use every day as consumers.

First they need to find what they are looking for, and Yahoo provides a good example here. The Yahoo site became popular based on its categorization system, not just its search engine. Make sure your Service Catalog provides a systemic categorization, sub-categorization and cross-linking system so that it’s easy to discover the services you offer. But don’t forget the search engine.

In our experience, most first-pass implementations generate dozens of requestable Service Catalog items. For example: Install Windows XP, Grant Access to SAP Finance for this AP Clerk, Change this Report, Upgrade this Server… and many, many others. At newScale, we’ve seen that a typical Fortune 500 company may have several hundred unique items in its IT Service Catalog within 12 months after the initial deployment. This complexity means that a categorization system and a search engine are imperative elements of the Service Catalog.

Any Wino Theory: If We Are Really a Team, How Come We Never Practice? (Part 1)

Lots of people in ITIL talk about the importance of team work.  Too me, too often, it gets very none actionable and touchy feely. 

Well my friend David Ward has been leading technology teams since before CPM tribes roamed the earth, and he has a very interesting and amusing perspective on his blog: ANY WINO theory.  The theory states:  Half of all technical problems can be resolved by patiently explaining it to any wino.

So I highly recommend this article if you are at all tasked with running or creating a team.
Any Wino Theory: If We Are Really a Team, How Come We Never Practice? (Part 1).

And I do recommend you read his whole explanation of his theory.

SF Business Tech Examiner: IT service catalogs—IT’s hidden secret

Even my local evening paper is now following service catalogues and name checking me. How cool is that? 

SF Business Tech Examiner: IT service catalogs—IT’s hidden secret.
What are IT service catalogs? A service catalog is simply defined as a list of services or products that an organization provides to its customers. In a sense, service catalogs are an ordering system that supplement the IT Help Desk or Service Center. They allow customers to directly interface with the various products and services that your IT organization offers. They do so without requiring your customer to call a support person for help in finding and ordering the services and products that you offer.'

newScale and Pink Elephant selected by South African Airways for IT transformation initiative

ITWeb :Pink Elephant selected by South African Airways for IT transformation initiative.

South African Airways selected Pink Elephant from a rigorous tender process, with the company focusing on the provision of clear, practical, service-oriented solutions and education, as well as introducing the “best of breed” newScale Service Catalogue as an accelerator. The newScale Service Catalogue software was proposed for its ease-of-use to drive self-service adoption as well as it proven ability to integrate seamlessly with its existing SAP enterprise systems and outsourced IT infrastructure.

Cisco: Service Catalog is Critical to Private Cloud Strategy

Last I attended a very interesting live webcast with John Manville, VP of IT networks and data center services for Cisco, on their implementation of a private cloud, CITIES--Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services. (The webcast is not available but the slides are.)

There are two things I took away:

1. Cisco has similar challenges to other large IT shops.
2. The IT Front Office is central to their internal cloud deployment of CITIES

First, the picture below shows their internal adoption phases.

 The roadmap has several phases, starting with MIST and going all the way to CUMULUS, each phase taking 4-6 months. In that sense it's both aggressive and pragmatic. If you see the bottom phases, it's where self-service and service catalog show up as basic enabling infrastructure.

1. Self-service requests and request catalog is pretty central to their internal adoption of virtualization. This encompasses:
2. Basic requests for Virtual machines
3. Bare metal requests
4. Service level and access control requests
5. Full service catalog integrated with other operations.
6. Integration with orchestration.

In the blue boxes, the outcomes for each phase are listed. From these outcomes, requirements can be derived for this "front office" infrastructure. For example, the first phase includes automated provisioning of virtual machines (VMware). This means that the catalog will need to have both a marketing front end and a back end that connects to vCenter or another management platform.

Later on, the catalog will track consumption, subscription in order to report SLA and cost allocation. Every one of the bullet points in the blue boxes needs corresponding Front Office functionality.

During the webinar John was asked:  How important is a self-service catalog?  He said,  "It's critical to CITIES. We are moving to a service oriented framework. The service catalog is a major part of that."

I have now seen more than a few plans for data center virtualization, and all of them have some sort of catalog and self-service in them.  What I like about Cisco's is that they are pretty clear the catalog is as important as a hypervisor if you are to achieve the economic impact of private clouds.

Second, the slide below shows the business pressures and operational realities that result in the typical IT squeeze.

This is another way to view the typical pressures newScale IT customers face from the business.

The goal of CITIES is to deliver operational efficiency and flexibility at a lower cost than today. Their goal for virtualizaton is that as of August any x86 request will go virtual, and the all refreshes will go on UCS. So over the next 2-3 years they'll be 70-80% virtualized. This is very aggressive goal: most companies have about 15% of capacity delivery by virtual servers.

When asked what was exciting about creating this private cloud, they said, "I'm excited about not getting beat up for lacking capacity." I love this quote!

I don't think most people building virtual data centers get the depth of requirements and work building that Cloud Front Office yet.  It's not only a technical problem, but a business model change as well.

Service Catalog Imposters: 7 Things You Need to Know

My marketing colleagues at newScale are preparing one wicked-useful and provocative webinar. It promises  eye-opening, pragmatic-advice you can use today, and it may be even funny.  The webinar is entitled: Service Catalog Imposters: 7 Things You Need to Know.

It's a much needed topic.

Service catalog is hot in 2009.  So a bunch of vendors painted lipstick on their pig and now some customers have catalog flu. This webinar is like a DNA test that will help you figure out which are real service catalogs and which are just fashion-forward pigs.

According to the Gartner, Inc. report "Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk " (Nov. 4, 2008) by analysts Kris Brittain and David Coyle, they wrote "Vendors are putting cosmetic enhancements on their self-service portals and are trying to call them full-fledged Service Catalog offerings... This is leading to confusion in the market." 

This is why i make the comment about fashionable pigs... You really can't paint a web form to your help desk and call it a catalog. Not if you are trying to implement an ITIL style service catalog.

If you want to learn what a service catalog tool needs to offer you, AND you want to be entertained at the same time, then DON'T MISS this webinar.

Here's the marketing copy.

• The seven limitations and fatal flaws of ITSM vendors' self-service request management modules;
• Real-world "horror" stories, case studies, and turn around strategies from IT shops that tried these tools;
• Why your service desk vendor may offer a "Service Catalog" module for "free" - and what that really means.

Service Catalog Imposters: 7 Things You Need to Know.

New blog and community

Today I'm launching a new blog dedicated to the intersection of cloud computing, ITSM, and IT business strategy.

As I've written before, I think virtualization and cloud are a sea change for the IT infrastructure groups. And therefore a big opportunity and threat for IT groups, ITIL practitioners and how IT aligns with the business. If you follow this blog, you know I've written extensively about before.

But the beauty of this blog, which I will continue to write, has been the focus on a narrow subject, service catalog and service portfolio, I'd like to preserve that focus.  The next topic is much bigger: the emergence of the IT FrontOffice for the cloud.

I want to explore and engage in conversations with a community a whole set of questions that cloud computing gives rise to, From strategic questions, such as:

• What are the new IT operational models we should be thinking about?
• What are the key service management processes I need to revamp, revisit or re-engineer?
• How do I communicate to senior management the options available?

To tactical questions, such as:

•  How do we charge and what do we charge if we are not providing computing power?
•  What rationale do we use to choose when to leverage internal resources and external resources?
• What should our catalog, account management and billing strategy be?
• What's the best self-service strategy?

The ServiceCatalogs.com blog and community will continue -- it's truly become a great resource and has a vibrant active community.

If you are involved in virtualization, creating the next generation IT organization, private or public cloud computing, I invite you to join my new blog and join the new community at: www.cloudfrontoffice.com

Citrix | Virtualization Information

Citrix | Virtualization Information.

Citrix is taking the approach with applications that they can be subscribed to by end users from any device from anywhere and still have a secure connection. According to Citrix, Dazzle is: * A self-service “Application Store” for corporate employees * A simple store front for applications published by Citrix XenApp * A familiar interface for end users to install applications for use with little or no training. The feel is like adding Acrobat Reader or some other web application

Follow me on Twitter

If you'd like to follow the conversation on twitter, find me as RFFlores

It'Deja Vu Again: (IT) Why Can't You Be More Like Amazon (Cloud)?

When I first came up with the concept of a service catalog to drive fulfillment process back in 1999 (Yep. 10 years ago. Time flies when you are having fun.) it was obvious that internal shared services like IT needed to emulate the likes of Amazon.

Well, here we are in 2009 and the wheel of time has brought us back to the same place.  Now it's the data center that is being disrupted rather than end user services.   Customers are beginning to ask:  Why can't you be more like Amazon EC2? Why can't you provision fast, at guaranteed cost?

The post below goes into more detail. This time, we ought to know one thing:
No Catalog, No Cloud. Right?

Many organizations are looking to virtualization as a way to accelerate and simplify application delivery by changing the form factor of the application workload to become easier to deploy and to manage over time. This virtualized application - or "virtual appliance," as it's often called, makes application workloads far easier to deploy, manage and maintain because it combines the application bits with everything it needs to run in production and delivers it as a self-contained application unit that can run in any virtualized or cloud environment - just plug it in and it works.

What's more, the virtualized application is fully instrumented for streamlined and scalable maintenance, significantly reducing ongoing costs and allowing IT organizations to do more with less. Think of it this way: The typical enterprise today faces the dual challenge of growing application complexity and flat or declining people resources.

Oh, I forgot a critical detail: Add to this the reality that lines of business are expecting applications to be deployed more - not less - rapidly. (Call this the "Amazon effect," which is the backpressure lines of business place on IT because of the instant gratification external clouds like Amazon EC2 appear to promise.

"Why can't you be more like EC2?" is the question de jour and fairly cringe-inducing for the unprepared CIO). Complexity is the enemy when resources are thin and organizations are under pressure to do more with less. Of course application complexity isn't going away - fighting that battle is like trying to hold back a rising tide.

But you can manage the complexity with new approaches for enterprise application virtualization, which can dramatically reduce the time, cost and risk of deploying and managing distributed application workloads across traditional, virtualized and cloud-based environments.

Recessionary Recitations: Reducing the Cost and Complexity of Application Delivery.

New Catalog Methodology

Yesterday I sat through a very cool demo from our professional services group. This was not a product demo, rather it was the latest update to their newScale FrontOffice Methodology, implemented as a collaboration portal. The goals of this methodology are to  make customers successful and independent fast.

The newScale FrontOffice Methodology is designed to guide customer through the three phases of their journey: Launch, Plan for Expansion, and Expansion. The new collaboration portal is designed to guide and support customers throughout the Launch phase of their Service Catalog project. The Launch phase comprises 4 stages: Plan, Design, Publish, and Improve.

The collaboration portal is used by newScale customers who are implementing service request fulfillment or service portfolio process. And it looks like this:

 

 

Drilling down, it outlines the whole lifecycle into an easy to use graphic.

And for every stage, it defines the activities and artifacts used and produced. For example, here is a small subset of the Plan Stage.

The little orange symbols?  SCM stands for catalog management, RF is Request Fulfillment and PM-DM is Portfolio and Demand Management.

And each of these tools has its own set of instructions and best practices. Every customer gets their own custom portal and collaboration site so it makes it easy to communicate and collaborate during the implementation . One of the artifacts: Kickoff deals with how to run that type of meeting and bring everyone together around the definition of "What is a service?" This is huge! Just being able to bring a team together to a common definition and a common toolset is one of the key obstacles to a catalog implementation. Also, the artifacts that describes roles, hand off's and required skills, really help a team understand their future operating models.

Here are some fun facts about the methodology:

• 40 professionals
• 70 Artifacts and tools were produced
• Based on almost 500,000 hours of implementation experience
• Over 13,249 Services defined.
• My congratulations to the PS team on a great new milestone.

Troy says: "When Defining IT Service Start From A Top Down Perspective"

My colleague and co-author, Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant just posted a super useful blog post.

Knowing where to start is half the battle and when it comes to defining IT services it is even more important. One of the frequently asked questions I hear when talking to people about defining IT Services in preparation for a service catalog project is “Where do I start”?
...

And he added an awesome 10 minute video tutorial, based on our book content.  I think this is really going to help people struggling with what is a service

If you want more detail, you can get the book.

By the way, service catalog templates  and great discussions are available free at our catalog community.

Service Catalog Practitioners are Needed to Build Private Clouds

This article by Michael Vizard is interesting. It validates that you, my dear reader, have a very important role to play in the building of private clouds. Michael is getting at the heart of the challenge an enterprise faces when it decides to build a private cloud.

One of the biggest strategic challenges facing IT organizations today is remaining competitive in a world full of cloud services that essentially outsource the IT function.

What makes cloud computing attractive to businesspeople is the concept of paying for IT resources as you go, as well as the flexibility associated with that computing model. In contrast, internal IT is seen as a fixed cost that executives have to pay for even if they are not utilizing all the assets at any given point.

I completely agree with Michael on this one.  The concept of variable costs and infrastructure as a service is a meaningful new way to use IT services. But this is not going to be easy.

The challenge for IT organizations is to figure out how to recast their internal IT operations into more of a service model that mimics the cloud computing model. The concept of managing IT as a service has been around for a while, but actually delivering IT as a service is much easier said than done.

In other words, we need to really think about the services we provide. And we need a service catalog and a product / service life cycle management process.

Now this service catalog has several dimensions we have not spoken about it in the past:

One, IT is competing with the cloud offerings, so it will need to define it's underlying technical services in those same market-ready packages.  Your catalog will not be and cannot be "unique" to your organization; it has to be mapped  to what external providers offer. What about the stuff not provided by external cloud providers?  It's either your unique value add, or waste.

Two, a new discipline of understanding customer demand and internal capacity to  directly link business processes and their resource consumption. Why?  Because in a private cloud we'll be looking to be able to dial capacity up and down; to achieve that we need to understand what business drivers impact what consumption to determine how much will be kept in our datacenter and how much needs to be on demand from our cloud provider.

Three, the discipline of IT supplier management will need to be brought into the 21st century. Once we decide to start using some cloud services, it means that our service catalog will show high-level business services, with underlying services that will come from a supplier.  This supplier will want to be paid for consumption, for meeting service levels, so it makes sense we put controls and governance over that spend. Supplier management was always part of the ITIL service catalog. The cloud makes it central.

(Real story: At newScale, I have been using Amazon ECS for a while. As I enabled different departments, we needed to start putting controls over usage.... I'll write more about it another time.)

Four, we'll need to understand unit costs of our services to determine, dynamically, (within minutes eventually, maybe quarterly now) which supplier offers the better offering, the more aligned offering, the best price.  This is where the catalog's role as service life-cycle management tool becomes SO crucial (see link).  And this is not a new-fangled idea. In manufacturing, product life-cycle management has been practiced for over a decade to control suppliers, but also to determine provenance. (Your lead paint comes from where and which supplier?  Your help desk is located in which hurricaned / civil war country?)

The rest of the article, deals with some of the key technological changes that are driving this transformation; it's probably more techie than what we usually discuss, but it's good to have a sense of the challenges introduced by virtualization.

For example, he writes, "The need to provide dynamic sets of IT services means that you have to master the ability to rapidly provision an application stack on top of a virtual machine and then be able to manage it as it floats across multiple instances of virtual machines that need to be created as demand for that application grows on the fly."

This challenge is exactly the kind of process problem service catalog practitioners are good at solving.  This is why I think, you, my reader have a very important role to play in the building of private clouds.

Article is here:  How to Build Private Clouds - IT Management.

The (Ongoing) Evolution of the ITIL Request

Rob has a great article on the importance of Service Request.  Recommended
The (Ongoing) Evolution of the ITIL Request.

Now ITIL v3 elevates the Service Request to equal billing with the Incident. In fact, if importance can be measured by number of pages then Service Requests get slightly more of the “Peas Book” (Service Transition) than Incidents do.

This is a great step forward but I believe it is not the final word. v3 still delineates between Incident and not-Incident as the two categories. That is, Service Requests are some kind of miscellaneous category for everything that is not actually an unexpected interruption to service. The two processes are quite separate. This does not fit well with my experience of reality. Admittedly, my reality has a few kinks, but in this case I speak on behalf of clients who feel the same way. For many service desks, Incidents are not the main part of their function.

Question: ow do I map a service at the service catalog if the same service can be delivered in different manners to different clients ?

Another useful thread that I think lots of people will find useful.
The conversation was started by Paolo with a great question:

How do I map a service at the service catalog if the same service can be delivered in different manners to different clients ? Do I map instances of the same service or I map the differences at SLA ?

An email service can be delivered by different CIs if this service is provided by different regional suppliers. It can also have diffferent resources and capacities. Is it a single service ? Or instances of the same service ? Or what ?

And a great discussion ensues.  You can find the whole discussion at our community site here. Feel free to add.

Membership (free) required. To prevent spam, there are some rules we put in place a while ago. We will need to approve you, but we'll do that pretty fast.

Service Catalogue Practitioners Don't Fear The Cloud

Thomas Bittman, a Gartner Group analyst, writes in Private Cloud Computing is Real – Get Over It.

There’s an argument over whether the term “cloud” can be used to describe the changes taking place in internal IT architectures. How silly! Regardless of the term, there is a major trend playing out over the next few years where internal IT providers want to make fundamental changes so that they behave and provide similar benefits (on smaller scale) as cloud computing providers.

I believe that enterprises will spend more money building private cloud computing services over the next three years than buying services from cloud computing providers. But those investments will also make them better cloud computing customers in the future.

I agree with Thomas. Private clouds are not a pure technological change, rather it is  the logical evolution of IT's move to be a service provider. An IT service catalog provides the front end to well-defined infrastructure services with clear service levels, pricing and support services requests.  The back office will then provision those offerings faster and cheaper because they've been standardized.

With private clouds, because we have standardized and made service components and costs visible, it's now possible for third party providers to offer us capacity on a variable cost basis when we need it.

So in fact, those of you working on IT Service Catalogues have nothing to fear -- you are on the leading edge of private cloud.   This is certainly a case we don't need to fear the reaper.

Killing us softly

There's skepticism about cloud computing and the virtual data center. There ought to be. 

But it does remind me of the proverbial frog in the boiling water  -  getting killed softly.   So when I read this post I was reminded of one of my favorite songs. And I loved the original but this is the one that gets me: Lauryn Hill delivers.

And here's what I mean. Cloud computing may not be ready today, but it's already killing us softly.
Another Half-Dozen Half-Truths of the Cloud.

We are riding donkeys!

My latest poll says 33% of service catalogs (so far) projects are riding donkeys; that is, have suffered slow downs due to cuts, but are still going in some shape. 

But 22% of project have gotten the Martian Death Ray -- canceled, obliterated, up in smoke. 

What am I talking about?  This poll. See the results so far and you can still vote. 

Which means the results may change minute to minute!

Case study time: How to Cut IT Costs and Govern Virtualization

Siemens Business Services uses newScale Service Catalog technology - for both end user and data center services - to increase IT efficiency and reduce costs.

They use an IT Service Catalog with their managed service customers for two functions:
For self-service request management, to avoid service desk calls and improve end user satisfaction; To drive virtualization and green IT initiatives, for cost take-out in data center operations.

What's interesting about this case study is the very clear and pragmatic business case they make.  It's so straightforward that you'll be shocked with how you can easily justify a service catalog project in THIS ECONOMY. 

If you are trying to figure out the economic justification of a service catalog, I recommend you attend.

Click here to register for the webinar:  Service Catalog Webinar: Service Catalog Case Study with Siemens.

And here's a little trick for my readers: show up early, and just ask your questions on the webex.  You are more likely to get your question answered!

Using Cloud Computing to Build Your Technical Service Catalog

Cloud computing can be extremely useful to help build your technical service catalog.  I read this short but very illuminating blog post by Gary Orenstein, The Enterprise Impact of Cloud Computing that supports this viewpoint.

Cloud computing brings two major aspect of a service catalog to light: Price transparency and how our customers will interact with our Data Center services. 

A couple of quotes from Gary's post. 

Pricing Transparency — Prepare Your Pencils
Whether businesses jump into cloud computing right away or later on, the pricing transparency from cloud providers completely changes enterprise practices for benchmarking IT costs. Companies routinely spend big bucks to understand IT expenses and effectiveness.
...
Now you can understand exactly how much it costs to rent an x86 server, a terabyte of storage, or a content delivery service with just a few clicks to Amazon Web Services or a host of other providers.

Which is exactly what we hope to achieve with a service catalog, have the customer understand what they are getting and the unit costs they are incurring.

And as to how our customers will interact with IT from now on, Gary writes:

It used to be that deploying a new application meant days or weeks of research, approvals, budgeting, planning and setup. Now it means that individuals outside the enterprise IT domain can pick a service offering of their choice, select a plan, and pay for it themselves. The barriers to start are low, the benefits of scale are high, and the decision gets boiled down to the simplicity of a free trial or impulse purchase.

I agree except that it's not days or weeks, but rather months and quarters. 
How long does it take to get a server into production?  Most enterprises it's 3-4 months, many even more?  How long to configure? Months?  How easy is it for the customers to order, track, understand options, costs?  Very difficult.

This is why I say the IT service catalog is CENTRAL to the next generation data center whether it's virtual, a private cloud or a public cloud.

Without a catalog that defines standard environments, allowed configurations, easy ordering, some sort of provisioning and self-service, customers are going to go their own way, as I've written before on 16 digits to freedom and Amazon has written your technical services catalog.

What do you guys think?  Is it all new, all old, or is there a nuanced view between hype and cynicism?

How has the economic downturn affected your service catalog or ITSM project?

Time for a poll! How has the economic downturn affected your service catalog or ITSM project?

The Cloud and the Service Catalog

Yesterday, we added newScale to the list of supporters of the Open Cloud Manifesto. 

I'd like to explain why this manifesto is important to the IT service management community and to us at newScale. 

In simple terms, when we talk about "cloud-computing" we are speaking of the next generation Data-center-as-a-service. Which is exactly the point of an IT Service Catalog: turn IT assets and activities into services which hide the underlying complexity of the supporting technology from our internal customers.

I've written about this before in "Amazon has Written Your Technical Service Catalog," and it's also what drove our recent product announcement.

First a word on the what and why of cloud computing.

The cloud is economically and operationally different from our traditional data center . A cloud provides the ability to scale and provision computing power dynamically, in a cost efficient and cost variable manner without the customer having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology. Cloud providers rigorously define their server, storage, network, service levels, prices and allowed variations to make provisioning fast and cost predictable. 

A benefit for service catalog practitioners is the market-ready packages and prices defined by the cloud providers can then be used as components to define higher level business services.  They are also useful to benchmark internal data center services for quality, price, and comprehensiveness.

The purpose of the Open Cloud manifesto is to frame a discussion about what we mean by cloud computing, what services we should expect from cloud providers, and what challenges and obstacles need to be addressed.  It is not a "standards" document.

The four goals of the manifesto are to establish open standards that enable customer choice, flexibility, agility, and skill-transference.

The point of choice is that over time, IT will need to change or add providers. If the organization needs to change providers because of new partnerships, acquisition, customer requests or government regulations, they should be able to do so.

IT will also need flexibility, because it will have different cloud providers, private cloud and its traditional data centers. I don't see cloud computing replacing traditional data centers, but rather augmenting them for scalability, testing, security, disaster recovery and for non-critical applications in the next two years.

And we can't take 180 days of architecture review to get an app-hosting environment deployed or our customers will dial their sixten digits to freedom. Speed and agility means IT can deploy new solutions that integrate public clouds, private clouds and current IT systems. And this means that we need really well structured and rigorous service definitions in our service catalogs.

While many think of cloud computing as a techie thing, in fact it has significant ramifications for governance and management. The manifesto addresses this directy.   

As IT departments introduce cloud solutions in the context of their traditional datacenter, new challenges arise. Standardized mechanisms for dealing with lifecycle management, licensing, and chargeback for shared cloud infrastructure are just some of the management and governance issues cloud providers must work together to resolve.

With cloud computing, we will still need to define standards, workflow for authorizations, manage lifecycles, and chargebacks.  We will need to provide self-service portals for our user to request and get provisioned; portfolio and financial management to our business customers to make visible service levels, costs, and usage drivers.   We will need to have system of record to define our service bundles, underpinning technical and professional services, automated provisioning, subscription life cycle management and billing.

In other words, we'll need an actionable service catalog that can work with the internal data center, the private cloud and the public cloud.

We'll need to put aside our cynicism and vendor distrust that sometimes permeates this type of conversations.  Cloud computing presents a financially and operationally compelling new addition to the IT portfolio.  It's not ready to replace our traditional data center and it may never be; but it will provide marginal competitive advantage much sooner than expected.  We'll need to have standards and governance to take full advantage of it.

I think this community, by defining IT services and standards, can have a big impact in this conversation.  This is why I felt it was important to add our voice of support on behalf of both newScale and the community that has grown around IT service catalogs. 

What do you think?

Sixteen Digits to Freedom

Cloud computing represents one of the bigger challenges and opportunities to IT organizations. This change is as big as the introduction of the IBM PC was to the Mainframe groups; computing power was democratized, decentralized and made available under the cover of expense reports.

With new cloud computing services providers appearing everyday, IT's customers are only sixteen digits from freedom They only need a credit card.

Sixteen digits to on-demand computing, storage, network and security; delivered at a predictable cost, with detailed service definitions. All of this dynamically available, on demand, and on variable cost basis.

Why wouldn't a department just do it?

Well, there are a number of additional requirements. For example, there's very Important Requirement #1, not mention Infallible Need #3, and let's not even talk about Security Issue #67. 

Now, I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek, not because there aren't real obstacles to adopting cloud computing; there are.  But because each of the objections noted above are features the cloud vendors are feverishly working to add. 

So maybe not tomorrow, nor next week or month, but sometime soon, Innefable Mandate #81 will not be an obstacle, and Important Requirement #8 will turn out to be not so important.

And this deep RECESSION is forcing the business to recasting and revisit priorities. Your customer will say, "This cost structure is very compelling. Its' the difference between doing the project and not doing it."  You can't say, "Heavenly instruction #59 is not supported in the cloud," because you customer might say, "Thank you. You may go." Softly adding, as you walk away, "permanently."

And they'll punch their sixteen digits to freedom.

Service Catalog for Virtualization and Computing Demo

Sometimes it's hard to explain the concept of a catalog. Particularly the technical services catalog. We get all convulsive and try draft a cross silo UN resolution to declare what we mean by a service. We get semantic, philosophical, ontological, definitional and pretty crazy. 

There's an easier way, friends. Why not see how we can operate after an actionable service catalog is implemented? Brilliant!

My colleagues at newScale got together and they put this entertaining, funny  and very informative "case study" to illustrate an actionable service catalog applied to the data center and application development.

It tells the story of a sad little dysfunctional IT department that adopts a service catalog after lots of.... hmmm.. breakdowns? And then illustrate how they operate day to day with a service catalog.

You can watch the story unfold here.

Maybe not Oscar worthy, but the Golden Globes are always good for an underdog, no?  Best performance for frazzled developer goes to Carol; Best geek impersonation goes to Steve (watch for the fleece jacket scene -- a geek classic in the making).

If you prefer your information all business-y, you can go here:   Service Catalog for Virtualization and Computing Demo. 

The current global economic crisis has taken away the luxury of operational inefficiencies

A bit off topic, but still relevant...  I was reading about Cisco's new server strategy and there were some interesting take aways.  First a quote:

"A similar trend has started to emerge inside corporations. Take the beleaguered financial sector as an example. The chaos unleashed by the subprime mortgage crisis has resulted in the formation of super banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo...

At the same time, the geographically and demographically diverse nature of global corporations is forcing companies to move their business processes online.

Many will have no option but to turn to the web and web-based software to unite its far-flung operations because they would need to be operationally efficient. The current global economic crisis has taken away the luxury of operational inefficiencies, regardless of the size of the company.

In a nutshell, the massive consolidation of this economic slowdown, is driving organizations to look for operational inefficiencies. 

If you can reduce your servers through virtualization, why wouldn't you? If you can shape demand with a service catalog why wouldn't you? If you can implement effective self-service and automate request fulfillment, why wouldn't you?

Is there a better use for that money?

The article: With a New Server, Cisco Pushes “Comm-puting” Strategy.

Service Catalog Tools: Free chapter from our book

I often get questions about the utility of service catalog tools and applications. We mostly have emphasized the use of the Service Catalog as a best practice to help IT groups manage customer relationships. But how does IT manage the Service Catalog?

Many of the operational question that touch the catalog have to do with the functions that need to be carried out, such as: Who maintains the service catalog? Should it be all visible? How does it interact with other ITIL processes? What are the tasks and role definitions for an IT Product Manager, Service Owner, Relationship Manager, Service Level Manager? Who should see what services?

This is where tools come in.

This summer, as I updated our service catalog book, we added a complete chapter on service catalog tool requirements that serves a dual purpose:

First, it can serve as the basis to build a Request for Proposal (RFP), Request for Information (RFI), or the business requirements for your catalog tool.

Second, it helps illustrate the day to day functions, hand-offs, and activities that are involved in managing the service catalog.

I've put the excerpt and a link to the complete, free chapter of "Defining IT Success Through the Service Catalog" at our LinkedIn community. Go get it.  It's free, as in free beer! 

The excerpt was graciously made available by my good friends at Pink Elephant.

How do you keep the IT service catalog up to date?

Great discussion going on.

At newScale, we have helped a couple of hundred organizations set up these processes.  I'll be writing about it soon.  But for now, we've seen two models emerge:  Centralized and Federated.

In the centralized model, a central team owns the catalog, owns the services, manages the publication and tools, and provides the "being in the catalog" as a service to individual service silos.

In the federated model, the responsibility for maintaining service definitions is delegated to individual service owners who define their own services. There's a governance, standards and release process that is centralized but the individual areas own their own services.

More about this, in a few posts. For now, why not join the conversation?