Service Catalog overview

A service can be defined as an offering, function, or activity delivered to an internal or external customer that may contribute revenue or complete a required task for an organization. Its output is created through the use of an organization's human, intellectual, financial, and physical assets.

In today's environment, businesses have numerous pain points in delivering IT services to their end users:

• Customers can not manage service delivery effectively:
  • Which “services” are actually being provided?
  • How frequently are they being requested?
  • How satisfactorily are they being fulfilled?
  • What will the future demand be for services?
• End users do not know what services they are entitled to and how to obtain them
• Operations personnel do not have best practice fulfillment processes defined, so the same requests are fulfilled in different ways
• IT services that affect critical hardware and software assets do not tightly integrate service delivery with established IT management processes

The Control Desk Service Catalog addresses these customer pain points by providing a complete end-to-end set of functions that permit the definition of different types of requests for services, a way to shop for those services, and a structured process that manages the delivery of these services. It provides a cost saving through the streamlining, automation, and quality improvement of service delivery. In addition, Service Catalog can be used to support management decisions about improving effectiveness of services and their delivery through assessment of service consumption patterns and the cost of fulfillment.

Organizations can choose to use all or some of these capabilities.