Service Catalogue and Service Sourcing

Service management organizations and processes increasingly become standardized and even certified according to ISO/IEC 20000-1, creating detailed knowledge of the IT services rendered. The description of the services in a service catalogue needs to be enhanced beyond the components of IT services to include all contributing organizational units and business processes. An integrated model of the service catalogue is developed, visualized in a novel way and exemplarily applied to a large service provider. Finally, its usage for balanced sourcing decisions is discussed. 1 Service Management as Part of the Service The provisioning of complex and cost efficient services almost always involves one or several integrated IT solutions – which in turn render IT services for internal or external customers. In the example of Toll Collect GmbH, the business services for the German electronic toll for heavy trucks involve more than 50 IT services ranging from standard IT applications (e.g. central billing processes, customer relationship management, and document management) to highly service-specific customer processes. The service levels are established according to the customers’ requirements and typically involve availability, performance and failure rate as metrics. As a result the most critical services are operated 24 by 7 in a fault tolerant environment consisting of several hundred servers regularly communicating with more than 650.000 units in the field. Since late 2005 it is possible to certify the management of IT services, i.e. the organization and its processes according to the international standard ISO/IEC 20000 [ISO05]. The certification of a service management organization ensures the implementation of processes covering all requirements defined in the ISO/IEC 20000 norm – including different perspectives of customers, services, technology, finances and