Service Catalog Best Practices

Overview

Service Management facilitates both the IT organization and the business it serves. Therefore, a Service Catalog serves two very different audiences: the business and IT customers who request and consume services, and the business and technical teams who fulfill and support them. These two audiences have fundamentally different information needs. Customers need to understand what a service is and how to request it. Technical teams need to know how to deliver it, what systems are involved, and what dependencies exist. Trying to serve both audiences with a single undifferentiated view creates a catalog that works poorly for both.

Best Practice

Maintain two distinct views of the Service Catalog: a Business Service Catalog for customers and a Technical Service Catalog for fulfillment teams. The Business Service Catalog uses plain, non-technical language and focuses on what the service delivers and how to request it. The Technical Service Catalog contains all of that information plus the technical details, dependencies, fulfillment procedures, and support information that operators need to deliver the service.

Benefit(s)

Separating the two views ensures that each audience gets exactly the information they need without the noise that belongs to the other audience. Customers find the catalog more approachable and easier to use because it speaks their language. Technical teams have access to the detailed operational information they need to fulfill requests accurately and efficiently. Maintaining the separation also makes the catalog easier to update — customer-facing descriptions can be refined without touching technical documentation, and vice versa.