The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Sample ITIL Service Catalogue documents"

iso 20000 policy statemet

sabana — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:19:13 +0000

hi all

I'm IT management student, I've been interested in iso 20000 and reading about it.
i need some examples for ITSM policy statement
is there anyone help me and give some sample of iso 20000 policy statement?
thanks

SOA and service catalog

David Zaucha — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:20:29 +0000

SOA and service catalog (sorry, I'm too lazy to use anything but the American spelling)... this may be a topic worth exploring a little further. I've been uncomfortable with the relationship between SOA services and (I guess we'll call them) ITIL services too, but my current thinking is that the differences are mainly in granularity, audience, and intent. I want to say that these are either two sides of the same coin, or nearly identical approaches to he same problem in two different contexts.

SOA is an architectural concept, so the focus is on how to decompose, build, and assemble system level services in the most efficient and flexible way to allow re-usability. At it's best, it's tightly tied to Business Process management practices and provides traceability between SOA elements and specific business processes or process steps. There's no question that a lot of value can be driven from this, but I don't know that the audience for this work extends beyond hard-core process folks and IT architects and developers who build stuff. Users only encounter the results of this work indirectly through UI systems that invoke these services.

That said, there's a section in TOGAF that discusses the difference between "Developer Led" vs "Business Led" SOA that seems to provide a bridge into more traditional ITIL territory:

http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap22.html#tag_22_03

Like the "business led" SOA described, ITIL is more management focused... there is less of a focus on the mechanics of building services, and more focus on customer and provider management concerns like the cost and quality of services, and how well they are serving their intended purposes. Said another way ITIL services exist more at the level of marketing and relationship management practices--as products, really--and "developer led" SOA services exist more at the level of engineering practices, as functional components, and are more akin to the ITIL Service Request concept. I'm sure I'm generalizing here...

Here's the part that I think gets interesting... If you build a service catalog from the ground up (as Ian would want us to) by starting with requests (orderable services/requestable services/or whatever term you want to use here)... your goal is the same as the goals of SOA: service requests that are reusable in different contexts. They should be able to stand alone as atomic requests ("deploy laptop", "provision LAN ID", "establish e-mail account") or be possible to string together into composite requests ("onboard new employee", which might bundle a dozen on more atomic request together) that handle common patterns of activity. It's still a mater of decomposing and assembling services in a way that the allows for flexibility and reuse. The main difference seems to be that SOA services typically exist in the application or systems realm and don't really concern themselves with services based on human effort (although the Amazon "Mechanical Turk" is kind of an interesting counterpoint here).

However, consider a fully automated service request in a user catalog: if a prototypical service request like "Reset my password" is entirely automated, isn't that automation accomplished behind the scenes via SOA style services? And similarly, isn't a user-facing application that invokes back-end SOA services pretty much just a specialized service catalog that is specific to a single process or domain? I'm probably not articulating this as well I'd like to, but I'd love to hear other's thoughts.

SOA, Service Catalogue, Business Service

Andy Bruce — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:31:28 +0000

Skep, thanks for the response. You are, of course, correct. As I have been enlightened in last night's chapter on Service Design, the Service Catalogue is broken down into Business Service Catalogue (customer view, non-geeky, relationships to business units) and Technical Service Catalogue (geeky, non-customer focused, relationships to other services).

Coming from a SOA background (but not from its Service Offerings and Agreements meaning), I was intrigued by the multi-level hierarchy and immediately thought of UDDI. I can possibly envision using UDDI as an advertising support service (delivered itself using ITIL) for some commercial business services delivered using ITIL (example: providing a new Geospatial Service, UDDI would provide a searchable way for "customers" to find this service and get information on it). Such a view fails on at least two levels. First, as you point out, Business Services are designed for "real" customers to read; not programmers doing a search. Second, UDDI isn't a valid way to advertise services in any case; there are really no public UDDI servers left (see http://uddi.xml.org/public-uddi-registry for the entry I found back in 2007).

In my defense, I think that UDDI could possibly be a reasonable database for storing service information to enable automated cross-referencing and to prevent service duplication or overlap within the portfolio. However, when I wrote the post I was simply excited to think about how to apply ITIL to a concrete programming-oriented use case.

It's quite interesting to see the role of Information Security Management (ISM) within Service Design. The ISM section in the ITIL book I'm reading included the CIA Triad (and even included the Authenticity element, but left out Utility, Possession, and Non-Repudiation) so I thought "Ah, IA!" Being an IA-type, I think of IA as encompassing, well, everything. However, the ITIL book definitely sees the role of IT security as being smaller; for example, Risk Management (RM) is a separate process from ISM while I would consider RM to be an aspect of overall IA. Then again, I probably just don't understand (that would be situation-normal for me in any case).

In deference to your request, I have forced my fingers to type the "ue" and I feel myself growing into a finer person as a result. Cheers!

UDDI

skeptic — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:32:26 +0000

Thanks Andy, interesting remarks, esp the view of risk. One thing though: perhaps I'm missing something but it always seems to me that the only things SOA and Service Catalogue have in common is that they have the word "service" in their names. An application programmer's callable service has little to do with a business service. As i understand it the relationship is many-to-many. SOA services are ITIL configuration items. So you wouldn't define catalogue-able services in a UDDI.

ITIL, NIST, PMI, DOD, and UDDI

Andy Bruce — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:40:54 +0000

Skep - Thanks for a great post!

I've been scarfing all I can on ITIL - what a great thing finally to be doing! From a service delivery / management view, ITIL has a well thought out and robust model. As part of MSIA work, I've been doing quite a bit of reading between NIST (FIPS 199/200, SP 800-53, 800-39, 800-60, 800-53a and friends) and DOD pubs (5000.2, 8570, 4245.7M, Risk Management Guide, 5200.1M) and it's interesting to relate them to ITIL service management. The key always comes back to risk management, that's true in ITIL as in PMI approach. (Interesting: both PMBOK and ITIL define risk as positive and negative; DoD / NIST use a negative connotation only.) I'm hoping to be V3 Foundations certified within a few weeks; in going through the ITIL literature it's like meeting old friends but with slightly different names.

Enjoyed the post; reading through Service Design I was intrigued by the multi-level (hierarchical) Service Catalog aspect, especially since it ties so closely to NIST concept of enterprise, hybrid, and system-specific controls. I wanted to find out who had implemented a UDDI using ITIL guidelines so I could get tips on service discovery. I'm thinking that my next SOA is going to look a lot more ITIL-ish.

For those that care, check out the Army Data Services Layer at http://data.army.mil/ADSL.html. It has a lot of good information on service management / governance that ties into ITIL and some downloadable toolkits (Java and C#). I can even claim a tiny bit of credit for it (I was part of the overall Army SOA Foundation back a few years ago and worked with the Data Services group closely standing up proofs-of-concept).

Back to reading...

Service catalogue books

skeptic — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 01:05:52 +0000

If you really want to know what you are talking about I recommend experience. If you don't have it, buy some. Get a reputable consultant with a genuine track record. Check references: are their clients still getting value from their service catalogue?

Writing a catalogue is easy. Buying an expensive tool and implementing it is just as easy. Getting the customers and providers to agree on what the services actually are so that you can populate it is harder. Putting systems and ownership in place so the catalogue remains accurate and widely used is even harder still.

You don't get that from a book, sorry.

if you just want to bluff long enough to move on to another project then my preferred book is Defining IT Success Through The Service Catalog: A Practical Guide, Second Edition

Forget the ITIL books, they don't say enough about catalogue. And I don't like Randy Steinberg's book Servicing ITIL - it is too geeky and treats technical systems as services. (Review coming one of these days). The Van Haren Best Practice book The Service Catalog is a better book but is still makes the same distinctions between business services and IT services and is a bit theoretical for me. (Another review coming one of these days). It still has good content - you might consider it as a second book.

P.S. ITIL spells "catalogue" as intended by God and Queen - I wish everyone would standardise. We spelled it first, America.

ITIL Service Catalogue

Margy — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:32:42 +0000

Hello, I am a fresh graduate who has started working for a large company and has been tasked to implement a service catalogue for one of their departments. So far, very good. It is definitely needed here and I have a lot of support from management. The problem is, I really want to do this right. Are there any ITIL compliant books you can recommend me to purchase so I really know what I am talking about.

Thanks heaps for all the resources you have provided.

catalog community still has the templates, Skep

Rodrigo Flores — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:09:00 +0000

Hey Skep,

The templates, samples, discussions are all still available
through my blog at http://www.servicecatalogs.com
or
directly to the LinkedIn group at:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=134909&trk=anet_ug_hm

We had to move from the old site when my SAAS provider got bought by Google who then ... pretty much canceled the service. So it was a bit of a forced migration, really.

Yet, the new community is doing really great with good discussions and no trolling. It turns out that real identities are important for professional discussions - new learning for me. And having a bit of control over who joins helps a lot to reduce spam and trolls. It's a professional community, so if you sign in as "kissmebooty" --- you are not getting in.

LinkedIn doesn't yet have good document sharing and other stuff but it's serviceable. And yes, it's not everyone's cup of tea

I'm glad to see you adding to the knowledgesphere. Feel free to add to the news section there. It's totally relevant and welcome.