Service Management Best Practices

Overview

The Service Catalog is one of the most important enterprise operational tools the organization operates. It is the front door to service delivery for every customer in the organization. And yet in many organizations, the catalog is managed as an administrative artifact rather than a managed product — it is updated when something breaks, not evolved in response to customer needs and organizational strategy. The catalog stagnates, adoption suffers, and the investment made in building it delivers a fraction of its potential value.

Best Practice

Apply the same product management discipline to the Service Catalog that is applied to every other service in the portfolio. Assign a Product Owner to the catalog — typically the Catalog Manager or a designated leader within Enterprise Architecture. Maintain a catalog roadmap that captures planned improvements to the catalog’s structure, content, user experience, and governance. Maintain a catalog backlog driven by customer feedback, usage data, governance requirements, and strategic priorities. Review and improve the catalog systematically rather than reactively.

Benefit(s)

Treating the Service Catalog as a managed product produces a catalog that continuously improves in its ability to serve customers and support organizational goals. Customer adoption grows because the catalog consistently gets easier to use and more relevant to customer needs. Governance improves because the catalog’s structural and content standards evolve in response to experience. The organization’s investment in the catalog delivers compounding value over time rather than depreciating as the catalog ages without active management.