Usage as Service Catalog

The Pergapedia Catalog can be used to manage your service delivery portfolio. Use the catalog to inform customers about your service offerings and service levels.

The Service Catalog should be dynamic, as services also change regularly due to new business requirements. Ideally a service catalog is a hierarchical structure of services, with business services mentioned on top. The lower you navigate through the hierarchy the more technical services will become. A well-defined service catalog gives insights in which technical services are required to enable which business process.

SMTX Service Catalog

With the SMTX Service Catalog solution maintenance and publication of a Service Catalog is simplified. SMTX assures that all service descriptions have the same quality level and informs Service and Catalog Owners about changes effecting their services or the overall quality of the service chains.

Text document based catalog

Many organization have taken the effort to write a service catalog, but fail in maintaining it in accordance with reality. That is generally caused by the way such a catalog is offered. When written in a text editor and published as PDF, maintenance can only be done by people having access to the source file. This is inefficient and is the perfect recipe for getting stuck with a catalog that doesn’t represent reality. The result will be that neither customer nor service providers know exactly what is within scope of each service.

Functions and features

The SMTX Service Catalog solution provides a set of features to keep the Service Catalog in top condition and make the Service Catalog the cornerstone of your service planning.

Service Navigation

The innovative Sunburst navigation system of the SMTX Service Catalog allows users to easily discover services. The rotating sunburst shows top level services in the middle and adds more levels while clicking through the hierarchy.

When selecting a service, the service description details can be seen, together with other information like available service requests, knowledge articles and outages. Only published information is visible in this area.

Service Analysis

The Search & Filter function allows authorized users to find all services that match certain conditions. It allows for example to find all services currently in User Acceptance Testing. Or to see how many users are subscribed to a specific service. Users will only see authorized services.

Service Content Design

The Catalog owner is able to define a number of service types and configure what data should be stored with a service of such type. This way, each service of the same type, will have similar information stored, resulting in a more consistent service catalog.

Distributed maintenance

Each service in the catalog gets a service owner and service editors assigned. These people will be able to maintain the services within their area of responsibility. A service can contain any number of data. The Catalog owner is able to set minimum quality requirements.

The service owner can assign approvers for accepting the publication of a service to the community.

Quality triggers

With a service type definition, the service catalog owner can define when and who should be informed in case of service updates. When for example a new hierarchical relationship is defined on a service, the service owner will be informed.

Additionally, it can be configured to alarm service owners in case their service has not been updated in for example the last 6 months.

Online publication

Only when a service definition has been published, the service information is available for browsing. A workflow defines who should approve the publication.

Version Management

Every time a service is published, a version is stored in the service catalog archive. This allows service owners and the catalog owner to compare how a service has evolved over time.

Service Catalog document publication

When desired it is possible to export service definitions into a PDF document. It is possible to select which services should be included in the document. This can be a manual pick, or a complete customer catalog, based on customer subscription information in the service catalog.

Service Chain calculations

The SMTX Service Catalog supports cost calculations through service chains. When linking services as parent and child, it is possible to set a charge index on that relation. The charge index is used to calculate how much of the child service costs is charged to the parent service. When doing that across the hierarchy, it is possible to calculate business service costs.

Calculations can also be used to check for chain issues. For example, when a low level service has an availability of 90%, it may cause issues for a higher level service that guarantees 95% availability. A chain calculation is able to identify such risks and send alarms to the service and catalog owner.

Service outages

When the Service Catalog is integrated with monitoring tools, it is possible to show outage information directly within the service catalog dashboard. By setting hierarchy impact definitions, a technical service outage will result in a visual alarm on related business services. Outage data can be set manually or be integrated with external solutions.

The dependency of services is defined within the service hierarchy.

Summary

The SMTX Service Catalog is a powerful platform to manage and maintain your Service Catalog online. Service owners will be able to individually maintain their services, while the Service Catalog Owner oversees the overall quality.

Through an advanced navigation system, the Service Catalog hierarchy can easily be browsed and discovered. For contract managers, a more advanced Search & Filter feature is available to easily find the exact service of their interest and to deeply analyze its usage and supply chain information.

By converting your paper-based Service Catalog to the online SMTX Service Catalog solution, you can make Service Management the cornerstone of your IT planning.