Service Catalog TemplatesOut-of-the-Box Service Catalog

Service Structure and Content Templates

Questions many people will have about creating a service catalog include "what should I include in my service catalog, what should it look like and where do I start?" These questions often delay, or even derail, the adoption of a service catalog within an organization.

To help customers overcome these worries and to ensure rapid deployment, assyst is delivered with a fully formed service catalog hierarchy structure and a comprehensive set of service and service offering templates. These allow customers to use all aspects of the assyst service catalog functionality out-of-the-box.

Axios Service Hierarchy

The diagram below shows the Axios structure for the hierarchy of standard IT services, which is supplied with each service catalog implementation.

These can be used as delivered, or tailored to suit each organization's individual needs. This provides a time-saving starting point to help organizations get quickly up and running with their service catalog.

Each service then has a supporting structure of offerings (or other services). The services are also linked to the relevant Configuration Items (CIs) in the CMDB.

Organizations define and structure their services, usually as part of an initial workshop, which always provokes discussion and debate around how to best group and order these. There is no absolute way to do this and the Axios model has been based on our experience and discussion with key practitioners.

Next: Services and Offerings

Services and Services Offerings

A Service - is a collection of service IT components that when combined provide a specific business function through IT – e.g. email, billing, procurement. A service may include other (child) services as well as specific offerings.

An Offering - is a specific task or event that can be ordered and delivered as part of an overall service. A typical example would be an email service with offerings of e.g. 'create account', 'remove account', 'add distribution group', or a specific business application service like order processing, with offerings of 'create account', 'change access permissions' and 'remove account'.

The distinction of services and offerings allows the IT organization to closely control the delivery, costing and reporting of each specific activity. The structure of services also provides the opportunity to 'bundle' up various services and offerings into service packages – thereby delivering business and customer friendly views and reporting.

Next: Service Catalog Views

Service Catalog Views

assyst provides comprehensive content for the three main 'views' or elements of the service catalog.

Although we can make the distinction in terms of views or elements, there is only one actual catalog – what we need is to use, display and report on different aspects of the services and catalog – to appeal to different audiences and with differing functions.

All of these elements are supported through standard assyst functionality and can be rapidly deployed using the supplied service and service offering templates.

Next: Supporting Data

Supporting Data

The Axios service templates also include a full set of other essential attributes to help customers fully realize all aspects of assyst's functionality. These attributes include:

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Default SLAs which will allow the duration of requests to be measured.
Process Workflows Structured process flows which automatically allocate request tasks to appropriate people and teams.
Event Categories These allow accurate categorization of requests, ensuring that they are allocated to the appropriate teams and provide invaluable trend reporting.
Custom Event Forms This controls data entry and ensures that the right data is captured when the request is logged.
Cost Types This allows different types of cost to be associated with services and service offerings, providing the ability to calculate the total cost of providing services to users.
Visibility Groups This ensures that service offerings are only displayed to the appropriate groups of people.

Next: Non-IT Services

Non-IT Service Catalog

assyst also provides service catalog hierarchies for non-IT services which can be used to start offering and measuring the use of a number of services owned by other areas of the organization.

Contact us to find out more about the benefits of our Service Catalog Software.