Service Catalog Community and Blog: Today is the day that changes the service catalog industry

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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.