I think the lack of responses to this says volumes. We’ve been struggling with this topic and it seems that there is no real standard in defining services either from an ITIL perspective or from a BMC perspective. Of course, this is just like all other things ITIL, in particular the CMDB.
In my planning, I’ve been thinking about it from the standpoint of what it would be used for. For example, if a user called in to the service desk, what would they say they are having an issue with? If it were with email, they would just say, “I can’t get email.” The issue could be with Exchange, the network, their PC, Outlook, or the other party they could be attempting to exchange email with. So from an Incident perspective, I’d want all of those things lumped into the “Email” service. However, if I were looking at it from the perspective of the group responsible for maintaining Exchange, I would simply want to include Exchange and the servers it sits on and ignore the rest. In reality, you may have a happy medium between the two, but I don’t think that there are specific guidelines for defining it. You could view it from a business analyst or programmer perspective: What reports do you want to get out of this thing? What functions will depend on this data? Answer these then work your way backwards. A major pitfall that may trip your organization up that I am trying to ensure doesn’t happen here is defining what appears in something like SRM or Kinetic Request as opposed to defining an ITIL service catalog. I’ve found that many people don’t know how to differentiate between the two, especially since there is a large overlap. I explain it as SRM just being a different module like Incident, Change, etc. with some services exposed there, others, such as Internet connectivity, will not show up there because it’s infrastructure. Many people focus on the “catalog” part of service catalog and think of things you order like from the Sears catalog. Shawn Pierson From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 12:29 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Help Designing and Implementing a Service Catalog for ITSM 7.6 Our CIO and a shared services working group (IT managers at the campus level) have jumped into a project to create a university system-level service catalog based on ITIL (which they know very little about), working from a template they “found” on the web. This is one of those typical top-down, consultant-driven exercises where the people who might actually have to implement the service catalog have neither been involved nor consulted. I believe that I will need to give them some sort of framework that describes how this information has to be structured to fit in the Atrium Core 7.6 Service Catalog, or they will wander off (they already have) and create something that is impossible to translate into the Atrium Core/ITSM 7.6 data structures. Part of my problem is that after a quick search of the docs and white papers, it does not appear that BMC has published a comprehensive guide to doing this yet. We certainly have no experience with it since most of these features are not present in the ITSM 7.0 applications that we have in production. We have not implemented the CMDB in our ITSM 7.0 system; we did not have Asset Management, and made no attempt to build anything in the CI Viewer for obvious reasons. We will have Asset Management in our 7.6 environment, but like the CMDB it will start out empty. Maybe that is a good thing – we will start out with a clean slate. We have ADDM, but the results we got from it during testing last year were not encouraging, plus the current released versions where changing faster than most folks change underwear – too fast to keep up with. Can anyone point me to a comprehensive guide to setting up the Service Catalog in Atrium 7.6 such that it will properly support Service definitions in Incident and Change (and I presume Asset), and down the road – assuming that we try to deploy it next to our Kinetic Request system – Service Request Mgmt 7.6. What I have found in the docs so far is mostly the usual “if you had any idea what you wanted to define, here is where you would do it” sort of thing that BMC Remedy is famous for. It is never in any sort of context where you can tell how it will affect the ITSM apps, or SLM, or SRM. The documents/postings/white paper that I found on BMCDN erred in the other direction, with very high level descriptions but no correlation to HOW anything has to be done to actually implement a Service Catalog in the ITSM 7.6 suite of applications. Maybe there simply isn’t anything out there yet; I am still bogged down in incredibly buggy installers trying to find the best route for upgrading/migrating the production 7.1/7.0 system to 7.5/7.6, so I admit that I have not looked too hard. Any pointers from some of the 7.6 pioneers out there would be appreciated. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.sug.com/disclaimers/default.htm#Mail . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender.
