Service Catalogs Help Demonstrate Value of IT

Ann All spoke with Markos Symeonides, vice president of business development for Axios Systems, a provider of IT service management solutions. The company recently released results of a global survey that showed 64 percent of respondents were implementing or looking to implement a service catalog in the next six months.

All: I know 64 percent of respondents said they intend to start a service catalog project in the next six months. But I wondered whether there was an historical comparison on whether this number has increased or decreased. Did you conduct a previous survey?
Symeonides: We did. About a year ago, we did a poll during a Webinar attended by 1,000 people, and 20 percent said they planned to implement a service catalog. With more people realizing what service catalogs are and how to implement them and the value they bring, there are a lot more people planning a project. In the pre-planning stages, you had a lot of people investigating what service catalogs were. I think 12 months ago a lot more people were doing that. We’ve seen a massive uptake since then. The analysts are excited about service catalogs as well, and are helping to educate people.

There’s a lot of confusion about what service catalogs are. There are three different catalogs. There’s the end-user catalog, where typically business users log into a portal and request services from there. Then there’s the business service catalog, which are the bundled IT components that make up the user services. And then there’s the technical catalog, which is all the underlying IT stuff that make up the business services. Tying these together is the secret sauce of making it all work.

All: I assume you want to start with the user services and work your way down. But maybe it's the other way around?
Symeonides: No, you’re absolutely right. Traditionally with ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) projects, people start from the ground up with things like a CMDB (configuration management database) and whatnot. But with a service catalog, you start from the top down, and that’s the right way to do it. You want to understand the business services and then understand what technical components will make up those services. It makes it much easier.

All: So service catalogs are higher on the awareness curve. Are there any market forces that are making service catalogs more desirable now?
Symeonides: The quick win for a service catalog is there’s a clear-cut business case. You reduce the IT costs involved with managing service requests by the business by at least 20 percent. So from the perspective of there being a demonstrable value, it’s a winner. In a time when the IT spend is being scrutinized more than ever before, a service catalog allows IT to measure its performance in business terms. IT becomes a visible contributor to the business direction. It’s easier to understand IT's impact.

A service catalog helps you compare your IT services with external services. IT can be honest and say, “You request a BlackBerry, and it will cost X dollars to deliver it and support it.” So then you can compare that. If we outsource that, what will it cost? It makes costs more transparent.

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