Service Catalog...Looking for Input

[Wallop]

Looking for input from those of you (and your organization) that have implemented a Service Catalog.

We are putting together a business case for using ITIL Best practice in Capacity, Configuration and Service Continuity Management and I seem to be getting the same answer from all the different consulting firms that are being evalauted..."You really need a Service Catalog to pull all the ITIL processes together."

I understand the concept of a service catalog (looking at Centrata, CA, newScale as potential vendors) and if implemented will certainly seem to help our company, especially in understanding our IT costs and being able to start a formal charge back to our internal customers.

So....looking for anyone's experience in implementing and using a Service Catalog....good and bad feedback is appreciated.

[rjp]

Parliament House in Canberra (Australia) is reputed to have put together an excellent Services Catalogue which they will share...but you'll have to get it in a round about way.

Go to the Help Desk Association of Australia's forum pages...
"www.hdaa.com.au/forum" and go to the ITIL>Service Delivery>Service Catalogue discussion. You will find a contact in that post who might be able to help you get a copy.

Apparently it is built in an Access Database - so you will be able to experiment with it.

Aside...

The evolution of the Services Catalogue from the rudimentary description given in the current ITIL is fascinating.

There are a lot of information 'structures' floating around Services, SLAs, SLRs, OLA, UCs, etc., and a lot of challenges with the relationships between serrvices and other information reprositories and record structures such as the CMDB architecture, incident records, capacity and availability plans etc., etc., etc.

Services are such a central concept to ITIL, I am surprised there isn't more discussion on Service Definition and Modelling in the Red Book.

Other disciplines are judged to required their own databases, such as capactiy management.

I am starting to think there needs to be somethin in the order of a Services Database - with guidelines to its form and contents.

I wonder if ITIL V3 will address this rapidly developing area?