Dow deploying newScale service catalog

NewScale announced today that Dow Chemical has selected its products to deploy their service portfolio and service catalog.  I visited them recently and was very interested in their initiative.  First, and excerpt and then some comments on the implications.

Dow purchased the suite of newScale PortfolioCenterTM, newScale DemandCenterTM, and newScale RequestCenter® software solutions to support its joint venture operations.

Joint ventures, or nonconsolidated affiliates, play an integral role in the growth strategy for Dow. These joint ventures have tremendous global reach across more than 100 countries and represent multiple different business models, requiring a flexible and high-performance service delivery model for IT and other internal service functions.

This means that Dow's IT has to be able to provide different services and  different levels to different customers.  Since these are joint ventures, this also requires the ability to track consumption, costs and pricing. Being able to bring Dow's experience in chemicals and the business services required to efficiently run those type of operations is a critical differentiator.  This is IT as a non-commodity. 

The immediate goal of Dow's Service Catalog program is to provide a "storefront" for service provisioning across its joint venture businesses. This includes the ability to catalog all IT services, manage the variations in entitlement to those services for each business, and streamline the ordering and fulfillment of those services.

This requirement to manage a large number of services, their variations and entitlements across multiple organizations, is what I call the bricks-and-steel service catalog. This type of catalog requires a new set of tools and practices, otherwise you risk spending 80 years in service catalog hell.

To meet these needs, Dow requires a scalable and proven Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management solution; one that will extend to non-IT services and complement their existing investments in back-end systems for service desk, asset management, and procurement.

Another interesting trend we are seeing: the demand for services that go beyond IT.  Many of these organizations are looking at full shared service structure, and in those, not everyone has access to the  IT help desk, or uses a different type of system as their source of record (think HR for employee set ups)

The company also requires the ability to easily design, maintain, and enhance their portfolio of services on an ongoing basis as business needs changed. Given the complex nature of their global businesses, these service design capabilities must support a distributed team of functional service specialists as well as a small centralized group of "subject matter experts". With these requirements in mind, Dow chose newScale after an in-depth request for proposal process and thorough evaluation of multiple IT management software vendors.

Another big requirement we are seeing: the need to distribute service design and maintenance to subject matter experts. A problem with a lot of the current products out there is that they presume you have access to the admin/developer who works on your help desk.  This approach introduces a chokepoint which prevents meaningful service catalogs from deploying on timely basis. They also introduce costs.  Dow's approach makes perfect sense, distribute service design to those most knowledgeable about the service.

For the rest of the story go to:  Dow Releases.

Comments

[Paul Burns]

This is a nice customer overview and highlights a key point around the widespread use of Service Catalog across the enterprise. My recent research in this area showed that more Service Catalog implementations include *both* IT services and services for other business groups (IT, facilities etc.), than just IT services alone. IT organizations that capitalize on this get a lot of positive visibility in addition to providing true value to these other business groups.