Implementing the Service Catalogue Management Carlos Mendes 1 , Miguel Mira da Silva 2 Information Technology Department, Instituto Superior Técnico Avenida Rovisco Pais, Lisboa, Portugal 1 carlos.mendes@ist.utl.pt 2 mms@ist.utl.pt Abstract – The Service Catalogue is a fundamental need of Information Technology (IT) organizations because it describes in a formal document the available services that these organizations have to provide. The catalogue contains the respective Service Level Agreements (SLA) that should be met, setting expectations between clients and providers of services. The Service Catalogue is integrated with other processes, including Service Level, Financial, Demand and Request Management – all these perfectly described in the ITIL books. However, about 30% of IT Service Management (ITSM) projects do not finish as a result of poorly defined IT services. This research proposes some solutions that try to mitigate the risks of a service catalogue implementation. The proposed solutions include a service definition, its components, the roles involved in its management, an identification process and a lifecycle process. The proposal was implemented in a private company, where we identified the services that composite the service catalogue. Keywords— Service Definition, Service Catalogue, Service Level Agreements, Service and Service Request Lifecycle Processes I. INTRODUCTION This research focuses on IT departments that provide services to other (primarily non-IT) departments of the same company. The application of the proposals to other environments (e.g., in multi-business situations) will be studied in the future. The need to describe a service is like the need to label goods or products in a supermarket. A product label provides a brief summary of the good to which it is attached. Prospective buyers can use this information, together with the price, to make a rational purchasing decision. Product labeling occurs for the safety and benefit of purchasers and providers. The same reasoning can be made with services [1][2]. Describing the services’ attributes requires a clear service definition and a service identification process [2]. The act of transforming resources into services is the base of the service management and without it an organization is just an aggregate of resources that by itself does not bring value to the business [3]. Nowadays, IT departments are imposed to justify their services and to analyze them from a cost-benefit point of view [4][5]. For that reason a service catalogue is a key element of an organization. The service catalogue may also be seen as a structuring element, because it allows a cost projection and it captures indicators of consumption and efficiency of the processes. A service catalogue can also be related with the following advantages [6] [7]: • Cost reduction: by the automation of the service subscription and delivery processes; • Transparency of costs: by the use of chargeback mechanisms; • Increase of operational efficiency: by the services standardization and by the delivery process optimization; • IT recovery: because IT begins to be seen as a partner and a business facilitator; • Increase of users’ satisfaction: by the processes transparency and by the expectations’ alignment. II. PROBLEM The Service Catalogue and Level Management are crucial IT management processes because most of the other processes are based on these. So, if these processes are poorly implemented, many other processes will suffer. For example, it has been reported that about 30% of ITSM projects do not finish because of problems caused by the service definition [8]. Although ITIL and other frameworks, such as CMMI for Services, describe how to manage IT services, these frameworks do not describe how to implement them – not to mention how to integrate them in practice with all other processes. For example, in a study with around 100 companies that tried to implement a Service Catalogue, only 57% reported the project was successful while 12% reported the project was completely unsuccessful. Furthermore, 34% of those companies mentioned service definition as one of the "top risks" for successful catalogue implementation [8]. When IT leaders confuse assets (that is, technology) with services, they confuse the business value of those assets with the business value of the managed activities around those assets. The business value of technology is ultimately determined by how it is used (or not). This accountability rests with the business; IT has little or no control over it. What IT does control is its own organizational effectiveness in provisioning and managing those assets [9]. On other hand, if IT does not understand the difference between a service and the elements that allow to provide it (process and assets), then they will tend to classify these elements as services. But the clients of IT have little interest in how to provide the services, because they only concern with results [10]. By consuming the limited interest of the clients with things that do not capture their attention (software,