Diligent IT departments are constructing and regularly updating their Service Catalogs. The even more diligent have calculated service costs and work hard to reduce them. So far so good.
However I think that two service catalogs are needed. One for the customer and one for the providers (even if we don't have providers for that service, we may have it in the future). Why? Because if the users can use the service directly they need a controller and not an IT department. Eliminating the IT department sounds like a huge cost saving. The only problem is that the clever use of information technology gives strategic advantage to the company but only if it's more than anyone can buy on the market. So IT has to deliver more and needs two service catalogs.
What is the difference? First the language. Although in both cases there is a clear service description and SLAs the user side service catalog can't use deep technical language. On the other hand in case of the supplier it is probably a must. E.g. what is a collaboration service on one hand is e.g. a SharePoint service on the other side.
The next difference is a composition. The information department may and should use several services to provide its users a higher level service.For example what is a guarantee that data and services are preserved for a user, is a complex set of backup and restore, collocation, storage solutions, tests ... etc on the suppliers side.
Third there is a difference of perspective; which is supporting a complex process on the one hand; is a standard service on the other hand. To support this requires the frequent change of perspective and is a very creative process. see Csikszentmihalyi.
Vendors of curse try to dig deeper and serve the users directly. It's quite a popular topic today and it will remain so, but there are two major problems. The smaller problems is that the vendor can share the specific knowledge he acquires at us and the greater problem is that we can get into a vendor lock in situation. Nobody wants that (even if some people maybe blindsided by the opportunity to get rid of IT). What they really want to push out everything which is standard. Maybe we IT people don't understand?
So this is the long discussed new IT. How should it work in a practice?
The IT should permanently analyze business processes and look for ways to better support them and making them more effective. Then found the standard building blocks to build these services. This requires permanent improvement and a lot of creativity. But first of all a change of thinking which still not happened. The new IT needs more long term business focus, process orientation and cost consciousness. Through this we can go in real (but not necessarily easy) partnership with business.
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