Explaining Enterprise Service Catalog
Service catalog is a key building block of any high-performing enterprise and acts as a central registry of internal services. Especially in modern, agile organizations that are promoting decentralized remote or hybrid workplaces, centralized service catalog is a practice to achieve a seamless employee user experience over fragmented departmental solutions.
The term itself originated in the IT Service Management domain and scaled to a universal concept for service management across all domains. From IT, HR, Workplace, Procurement, or Finance to internal knowledge work like Research, Analytics, Media, or Publishing.
Explaining the abstract concept of service catalog became a challenge. It slips into circular definitions of “catalog is a catalog of X” and buzzwords with incoherent variants of “digitizing and digitalizing”. As a result, despite a motivated corporate claim, the overall maturity of the service catalog is often lower than the aspiration.
My goal is to educate leaders and stakeholders by explaining the service catalog in plain language that supports actionable implementation. I work within the ServiceNow eco-system, but my goal is to avoid specific product marketing. Service catalog as ITIL or ISO standard is adopted by all cloud vendors, from Google, Amazon, Salesforce, BMC, Atlassian among many others. Companies apply their own brand value proposition, such as Services Hub (Microsoft) or CSDM and Employee Center (ServiceNow) but they share a similar underlying foundation.
Before moving on to the definition of service catalog, let’s establish the baseline first. How do we define an internal service offering?
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Explaining Enterprise Service Catalog
What is an Internal Service Offering
