Crossing the 1000 service definition barrier

Last week's Service Catalog conference is over and what a great week it was.  So many good sessions and case studies that I'll be commenting on.

As I watched the customer presentations last week, one trend jumped at me: newScale customers are accelerating the number of service definitions in their catalogs faster than industry norms.   

Many of our customer’s catalogs are on their way to break the 1,000 service definition barrier—what I call Catalog Mach 1.  Some have already passed it; some will pass it soon. And I expect most will break Catalog Mach 1 in 2009 with our new industrial-strength catalog management.

The business cases presented were compelling.  The more service areas they convert to their service request catalog, the better and better their ROI.

First, as they expand their catalogs, they are taking out other systems or avoiding purchasing additional software and concurrent projects.  In some cases, these are very hard dollars in cost avoidance, elimination of obsolete systems, etc.

Second, the more services in the catalog, the more users that go for it as the source of truth, which leads to more services.  And adoption is key to attaining value.

Third, several customers had already expanded beyond IT services and were looking at services that would impact the business directly and / or be external facing. 

So you end up with a metric that has Cost per Service per Person that is very compelling.

So that’s cool.  But then I thought, how long would it take our competitors to cross catalog Mach 1?  The answer is 80 years. 

Stay tuned for the next post and find out why it takes 80 years.

Comments

[John Worthington]

I was wondering whether 'more services' is necessarily better. Automating workflow is great, but wouldn't a consolidation of the catalog simplify both workflow and use of the catalog?

It sounds like folks are defining services from the 'bottom up', which is ok from a workflow automation perspective, but wouldn't a 'top down' design strategy offer the potential for consolidation and reducing complexity?