Catalogue of Requests (1 of 2)

The concept of Service Catalogue is based on an IT Service Management System that takes its inspiration in ISO 20000 or ITIL. In spite of this, it is easy to confuse with the Catalogue of Requests. In this article, we will explain the differences between these two concepts.

The Service Catalogue is a fundamental concept for providing high-quality services to our clients, as we have already explained above.

The Service Catalogue is like the menu at a restaurant and represents our offering of services. Hence, it answers the question, “What services can a client contract?”

Sin embargo, Nevertheless, the services contracted by a client can be easily confused with the requests that we accept to provide these services.

In fact in Proactivanet it is typical to use the concept of category to model the services and to link the Service Catalogue with the classification of requests.. In spite of this, we must assume that there is no one-to-one relationship between category and service, since the same service can require several categories into which to classify the records.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. Suppose that our IT department provides a service to the other employees of the organization that consists in enabling them to request IT material on a temporary basis for their activities. For example, a laptop if the employee is going on a trip, a meeting room with overhead projector and digital blackboard if an employee has to organize a conference, etc.

In this case, the Service Catalogue contains only one service (provision of material). In order to provide this service, however, we can offer different requests and these will be consistent with the Request Catalogue.

For example, in this scenario the Request Catalogue could be made up of:

• Request to reserve the material.
• Request for training on use of the material.

In this manner, if at Proactivanet, we want to model the Service Catalogue and the Request Catalogue, the easiest method will be to use categories that form a tree with two levels. The first level will be the service and will be made up only of the “provision of material,” while the second level will be made up of “reservation of material” and “training.”

In the second part of this article, we will explain why it is important to have the “types of requests accepted” clearly identified.

José Luis Fernández Piñero