Right now within IT circles around the world “Service Catalog” has become a buzzword. For those unfamiliar with the term “Service Catalog” the easiest way to relate it to our everyday lives is a menu at a restaurant or using iTunes to order apps, music and books.
The perception of many customers is that “IT is too hard”. Many struggle with different places to order different services, are unsure of the cost involved and do not understand the true value IT provides to the business. Part of this is because IT does a poor job marketing and selling what they do to the business. A service catalog is a great mechanism to market and sell IT services 24x7 and provide useful information about the services offered.
New generations entering the workforce expect the same experience they receive when ordering products and services at home, whether it be using iTunes, the App store, Amazon.com, etc. etc. It is really easy to order an app from the app store – just one click and it arrives instantaneously! It is very easy to order a new laptop from Amazon.com – just one click and it arrives within a week. Many organizations have a very manual request fulfillment process in place when employees try to order new services from IT.
A slick customer-facing service catalog is a great first step to improve the customer experience when ordering services. Even if there are some manual processes on the back-end your customers will not know this. Just make sure you provide some level of expectations in the catalog.
In future blog posts we'll discuss some other important reasons why a Service Catalog is critical including:
* Cloud Services and Multi-vendor sourcing
* Demonstrate value to the business
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