Discussion: What's the proper level of detail in a service catalog? #ITIL

Great question from Marcello in Service catalog community site.

I'm new in managing this type of issues. I have a question. I'm compiling a SC that describes services offered by my group towards our clients. What I want to know, is how to determinate the level of detail in describing services.

For example: I need to write "E-Mail" as a service, or can I write "Creating account, managing groups, reset password, ..." and so on?

Followed by a great answer from my friend Jaime.

The question, for me, is always "who is the listener?" I see two types of catalogs: 1. The service offering catalog, which is the catalog of all the services I offer to be presented to a business observer with the purpose of getting a business unit manager to contract with me, the IT owner. At this level of detail I describe "Email Services" and describe under it, with clarity what I offer under it: "xMb per user, at 10$ a month per user, with such response times to incidents etc." 2. The service request catalog, which is the catalog of all the requests a user can make to the organization. Notice the distinction between offers and requests. In this context, the business units have already established a contact between the offerings, and now the end user is in need of some sort of email "service request". At this moment, in a linguistic fashion, I use verbs to describe these catalog entries like in "increase email storage" for instance.

The rest of the discussion here