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Chapter 5 ■ Service Design
Think of a service catalog as a restaurant menu. A menu lists all the appetizers,
entrees, main courses, drinks, and desserts the restaurant serves, along with the price for
every item on the menu. The customer looks at the menu, decides what he wants, and
places an order. Typically, you would not find dishes that are not served listed on the
menu. If any of the dishes were served at a previous time but are no longer available, they
would be duly taken out of the menu.
In a similar vein, a service catalog lists all the operational services that the service
provider offers, along with other aspects such as the details of the service, who the point
of contact is, and the cost and specifications. As with the restaurant menu, the services
that are no longer offered (retired services) are taken off of the list.
Apart from the live services, the service catalog may also contain services being
prepared to be deployed in the near future. However, whether or not to-be-live services
make it into the service catalog is at the discretion of the service provider. In a practical
sense, it is a good marketing trick to ensure that your customers start seeing yet-to-belaunched
services, with the aim of getting buyers before the service has launched.
To state an example, think of your mobile service provider. They all have their
services listed on their services menu. And the new services, such as 4G Internet, which
was introduced sometime in 2014, would have made it to the list of services even before it
was launched.
Figure 5-7 is a view of a service catalog tying in with the customer’s business
processes and in the backend with the supporting services. When the customer looks
at the service catalog, he will see services A, B, C, and D on the menu along with their
depictions but not the supporting services (a, b, c, d, and e) that enable the customerfacing
services.
Business process 1
Business process 2 Business process 3
Customer i Customer ii Customer iii Customer iv
The service catalog
SLA SLA SLA SLA
Customerfacing
services
Service A
(core service)
Service B
(enhancing service)
Service C
(core service)
Service D
(core service)
Supporting
services
Service a
Service b Service c Service d Service e
Figure 5-7. Service catalog with service types
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