By Dick Stark

On Wednesday 160 people attended RightStar’s “How to Build an ITIL Compliant Service Catalog,” led by Solutions Consultant, Ron Hill.  This was our best turnout ever for a RightStar webinar and it underscores the importance of a service catalog as the cornerstone of the IT organization.  Service catalogs, which are sometimes referred to as self-service portals, have become mission critical to the entire organization. Properly deployed, a service catalog is the new “face of IT” within the organization providing actionable service offerings normally delivered quickly and efficiently to the requestor.

RightStar offers service catalog consulting and implementation services through BMC’s Remedy and Service Desk Express (SDE) product offerings.  With Remedy’s Service Request Management (SRM) add-on, RightStar recommends designing a service catalog based upon what matters most to the organization and move onward from there.  For example, at a large governement agency, RightStar worked with several systems integrators to implement a Service Catalog for hardware, software, and cell phone requests across the organization.

SRM allows a customer to login and create actionable service requests from a predetermined menu. It only shows services that each customer is entitled to order. A general IT incident service form was also created for customers to directly report an issue. RightStar installed and configured SRM and individual services were created for each type of IT-related request. SRM was highly customized to the environment to reflect the Agency’s organization and operational structure. Requests can be approved or rejected directly in the system. IT and project management staff use the system to receive assignments, track progress and complete requests. By improving efficiency and transparency, SRM has greatly enhanced the Agency customer service experience.

With SDE, RightStar provides static Service Catalog services using SDE application or, when more personalization is required, MagicPortal. At a commercial organization, RightStar installed MagicPortal as a service request portal for their external customers, allowing support requests to be made efficiently without the need to talk to a support technician.

With Remedyforce, an actionable service catalog (and request fulfillment) is now included at no additional charge as part of the winter 2012 release. This latest release brings Remedyforce much closer to parity with Remedy from a functional feature perspective.

IT’s goal should be to make provisioning a laptop or cellphone as easy as ordering a book from Amazon. It is the service catalog that:

• Defines and communicates standardized offerings, to ensure that every request is not a one-off project.
• Provides an easy-to-use interface to enable self-service for business users or developers.
• Facilitates automated provisioning, tracks the lifecycle of the service and captures data for billing or service costing.

In summary, actionable catalogs bring true automation and efficiency and provide IT organizations with improved customer satisfaction and cost savings.