Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices

Overview

The Service Catalog describes what the organization offers to its customers. Enterprise inventories describe what the organization has, does, and depends upon. These two views of the enterprise are complementary but are frequently maintained without connection, producing a gap between the customer-facing description of enterprise capabilities and the underlying operational reality of how those capabilities are delivered. This gap makes impact analysis difficult — if a system is disrupted, which services are affected? — and makes service design uninformed about the operational assets available to enable new services.

Best Practice

Establish formal relationships between the Service Catalog and relevant enterprise inventories. Each service in the catalog should reference the systems and applications that deliver it, the processes that fulfill it, the people and teams that operate it, and the vendors whose products enable it. These relationships should be maintained as relationship attributes in the relevant inventories and as reference data in the service catalog. Changes in the underlying inventory items should trigger reviews of the affected service catalog entries.

Benefit(s)

Connecting the Service Catalog to enterprise inventories enables service impact analysis, informs service design with operational context, and ensures that the catalog accurately represents what the organization is operationally capable of delivering. When a system is disrupted, affected services can be identified immediately. When a new service is being designed, the operational assets available to enable it are visible. The organization develops an integrated view of its capabilities and the operational foundations that support them.