Service Catalog Best Practices

Overview

A single service entry that tries to serve both customer-facing and technical fulfillment purposes ends up serving neither well. When technical details are visible to customers, they are confused and overwhelmed. When customer-facing language is all that exists, fulfillment teams lack the information they need to deliver the service correctly.

Best Practice

Maintain a clear structural separation within each service entry between the information customers need and the information fulfillment teams need. The customer-facing portion describes what the service is, what it delivers, and how to request it — in plain language. The technical portion contains fulfillment procedures, system dependencies, escalation paths, and operational details — accessible only to the teams who need them.

Benefit(s)

This separation makes the catalog simultaneously more accessible to customers and more useful to operators. Updates to technical procedures do not require revisiting customer-facing descriptions, and vice versa — reducing the overhead of keeping the catalog current. The separation also reduces the risk of sensitive operational details being inadvertently exposed to customers.