How to Build a Great Service Catalog Using ITIL 4 Concepts

The service catalog – a linchpin in connecting us with those we serve

One of the best ways any service organization, IT or otherwise, can radically improve relationships with customers (and/or users, take your pick) is by creating a simple, beautiful, and useful service catalog. Great service catalogs clearly communicate what we offer and prompt meaningful conversations with customers around how we’re meeting their needs – and sometimes how we’re not.  This approach helps us discover new, innovative products and services that solve real problems for our customers and elevate how work is done across the organization.

Most companies have “good enough” service catalogs – a huge missed opportunity.  A less-than-great service catalog creates confusion and encourages the proliferation of “shadow IT” (Note: shadow IT is not always a bad thing and can provide opportunity for collaboration and digital innovation). Often, customers don’t realize that we in IT can do something so they press on and buy it on their own, which results in technology sprawl including tools and even devices that may not meet organizational standards (from a usability, scalability, or security perspective); it all becomes much more difficult to support.  So, how do we avoid the trap of customers, at best, being unhappy with the catalog we provide (and not letting us know) and at worst going elsewhere to fulfill their needs?  This article will provide several recommendations for building a great catalog – and flag some key questions to consider along the way.

Defining and maintaining a great service catalog

There are two main sets of activities involved in developing a great service catalog: 1) setting it up right and 2) keeping it current. The sections below provide several ideas on how to do both well.  That said, processes around the service catalog don’t need to be overly complex.  We should focus solely on making sure we give the catalog the care and feeding that it needs in order to support those we are creating it for in the first place.

Questions to ask when building or revamping a service catalog.

Whether building a service catalog from scratch or revamping an existing one, there are some important questions we should ask ourselves along the way to ensure we remain customer-focused. Here are a few favorites of mine that I’ve paraphrased and expounded upon based on the official ITIL 4 Service Catalog Practice Guide:

• Who is my audience and what do they care about? Understand and appreciate the decisions customers are trying make and/or actions they’re trying to take. It’s also important to understand and empathize with the problems they’re ultimately trying to solve by way or utilizing the service catalog. If revising an existing catalog, answering this question may also involve researching and identifying key stakeholder groups and verifying that they remain valid since the last time we did this exercise.
• What services and service offerings make sense to include? Our catalog does not need to include everything single thing we offer.  Instead, we may decide just to include our most critical services.  By keeping things simple, we alleviate the risk of overwhelming our customers and users and having them shy away from using it in the first place. If we can report on the most frequently requested items and services, that is a great place to start the selection process.
• What’s a reasonable level of granularity to include? Again, we don’t want to include every possible detail in our service catalog as it’ll overwhelm our audience. Pick some key items that are helpful (more on that in the next section).  This approach will allow us to get initial feedback from our customers and users on whether they would like to see additional information and at what point the level of detail becomes overwhelming for them.
• How are we going to keep the information current? Establishing some simple guidelines can be helpful to make sure we maintain the discipline to keep the information in our catalog current. Since most service catalogs will be, in large part, advertising our common service request offerings, it is critical that they are consistent in their accuracy. Lapses here degrade trust and cause customers to try to solve their own problems in ways that are often outside the bounds of established policies and processes.

These questions help us begin with an outward focus and base our decisions on what our audience needs.  Mistakes most IT organizations make involve looking inward and publishing what they assume customers and users want, without seeking their input along the way.  Unsurprisingly, this approach tends to alienate customers and waste our own time.  Identifying thought leaders within these key-stakeholder groups can help a lot. A great service catalog should be a frequently-used and valuable tool in the eyes of those we serve.  If it’s not, we’re doing something wrong and must address it.

Gathering data for the service catalog.

Once we have asked the right questions, we have the task of creating a well-organized structure of service categories, determining the detail to be captured about each service, and gathering those details from a variety of places.  The figure below provides a starting point for details to consider capturing and communicating to the audience – and the outcomes they help support.

Once we’ve figured out what to consistently capture across our services, we then need to track down where this information resides.  Pieces of information may be contained across several different databases or other systems.  We will also want to look at building integrations between systems, so the information in our service catalog can be kept up to date automatically with minimal manual upkeep.

Questions to ask after creating a service catalog.

After an initial or refined service catalog is created, getting regular customer feedback is essential.  Facilitating in-person or virtual focus group discussions and asking a few simple questions can be extremely helpful, for example:

• Would you recommend this catalog to a friend or colleague? (to capture NPS scores)
• One a scale of 1 to 10, how useful do you find the service catalog and why?
• What do you find the most helpful?
• What areas of improvement would you like to see?

Our customers and users provide a different, outside-in perspective and their feedback is invaluable in structuring and organizing our catalog, presenting the information, and even wording our services. Regularly seeking and digesting that feedback also strengthens the relationship and ensures we are keeping our focus squarely on those we serve.

Below is an example pulled from the ITIL 4 Service Catalog Practice Guide of some simple steps for defining and keeping our service catalog current.  This workflow can serve as a good starting place.

Ensuring the service catalog helps our internal customers and users

A service catalog can be a great hub of information not only for external customers and users, but for internal teams as well.  The information within it will often be used by Portfolio Managers, product teams, support teams, relationship managers, and supplier managers (to better understand and manage suppliers that support pieces of catalog items); their needs may be very different from external customers and users.  Internal stakeholders may care about who uses and pays for particular services, which teams support that service, what Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are tied to that service, and who the service owner or relationship managers are for a particular service or group of customers. Ultimately, what our catalog looks like should align with what our customers and users, whether they be internal or external, need from our team.  The important part here is that we remain clear on who we’re building the catalog for and why and we keep it simple and useful, so that it continues to bring value.

Four ways to continue your service catalog journey

Here are some additional resources to strengthen your service catalog knowledge and/or take your service catalog to the next level:

• Read this Beyond20 article on mapping business services and the IT components that support them. This article provides a nice overview of creating multiple views of a catalog, making it actionable, mapping out specific technical services, and creating a clean, visual diagram using something called the OBASHI method.
• Attend an ITIL 4 training course: A 2-day ITIL v5 Foundation course is a solid starting point for understanding service catalog basics. Axelos publishes electronic versions of all 34 Practice Guides (including Service Catalog) as part of their MyITIL program, and the great news is that students receive a free subscription to MyITIL for one year by taking an ITIL v5 course.  Otherwise, subscription to access the guides is $50/year.
• Invest in Service Catalog Consulting: There is tremendous value in getting key internal and external stakeholders into a room to figure out what your catalog should look like. If the idea of getting several strong personalities and different perspectives into a room and being able to make significant progress makes you nervous, think about having a neutral party, someone who’s built scores of service catalogs, facilitate the conversation.  We regularly help our clients build out their catalogs and can lend support.
• Find a customer portal tool: A spreadsheet only goes so far. To take your service catalog to the next level, we recommend understanding what customer portal toolsets are out there.  We’re also seeing many of our clients put a focus on UX/CX design when creating online customer portals.  We’ve helped many clients build beautiful customer portals and are happy to provide lots of ideas on what’s possible.

Building a great service catalog is a worthwhile and valuable endeavor, for both to you and those you support.  Hope that these ideas help you in your journey.