Reducing IT Costs, Design a Service Catalog

I came across an interesting article on MOF / ITIL in Computerworld by Stevie Sacks, titled “Reducing IT Costs, Step 6: Design a Service Catalog.”  Stevie mentions having two catalogs.  One catalog being high level and public facing used for better customer service and supporting their decisions and the other catalog for internal IT use would contain the information needed to support service level mgmt, configuration mgmt, etc.  He mentions that “standards organizations like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework go so far as to designate the software, hardware and personnel needed to perform the provisioning of the service. The services catalog will also contain additional service definitions that aren't available for subscription, such as decommissioning of hardware”. 

It’s a good article you should take the time to read.  Whether you implement single or multiple catalogs, requirements should be defined ahead of time and solutions developed to meet those requirements.  Do not stumble through creating a service catalog without first determining what you are trying to accomplish.

Side Note:  Sorry it has been some time since I have posted.  I have been on vacation in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and didn’t have access to anything up there.  So there is good and bad to being back home.