What is a ITIL service catalog?

The service catalog is a document that is the description of services previously discussed, agreed and offered to their users and customers.

The model defines an ITIL Service Catalog – as a “written statement of all available IT services, supply levels and patterns of their options,” in which a service is defined as “one or more IT systems that enable a business process.”

Several authors make the analogy of the service catalog with a restaurant menu. In a restaurant menu, you will notice that the organization is provided by the establishment. You will notice that there is a section of beverages, meats, pasta and desserts. Within each section, there will be various items, prices and other conditions that define the supply and delivery of the service to be “bought”. Thus it avoids unpleasant surprises regarding the service chosen, either on the user / client side or service provider, since “supply conditions” are clearly defined.

There are a number of advantages when implementing a service catalog (I’ll talk about the advantages and how to create the service catalog in coming posts). The service catalog can be a printed document, a shared spreadsheet network, help desk software with this feature, a web page, among others. More important than the form of display of your service catalog is the adaptation to the challenges and needs of your organization enabling the management level of services.

The service catalog is not a final document, static or unchanging. It is a document that should be reviewed periodically and modified according to the characteristics of your business. There are a number of models of service catalogs found in the internet, some more complex and more simple. Which is the best? The best is the one that is more cohesive and more easily adapts to your business.

For companies that want to implement service level management according to ITIL best practices, I recommend the use of catalog services.

What is SLA and why use it?

The service level agreement (SLA) is part of the service contract between two or more entities in which the level of service provision is formally defined. In practice, the term is used in the context of time to provide a service or a particular task.

For example, if company “A” hires a delivery service level of 95% in less than 24 hours from Company “B, 95% of the services have to be made in less than 24 hours.

The SLA’s history dates back to the early 1980s, with the telephone operators.

A SLA contract includes information about: establishing services, performance, problem management, accountability of both parties, guarantees, emergency measures, alternative plans, plans for temporary applications, monitoring reports, security, confidentiality and cancellation of the contract .

A service level agreement may include, among other terms, specifications for:

Availability. Ex: During a year, the system may be unavailable at most for 8.7 hours (99.9% availability). This item will be divided into planned stops (for periodic maintenance) and unplanned (errors, problems, etc.).

Incidence of errors. Ex for a year, the system shall not register more than one error per 1,000,000 processed transactions.

Performance. Ex: The system should process the payroll for a maximum of 2 seconds every 10 servers processed.

Priorities. Ex requests classified as “urgent” should be resolved within 8 hours, “important” requests will be resolved within 24 hours, and “routine” requests will be resolved within 72 hours.

SLA and indicators

The compliance of an SLA is linked to indicators for automated collection and monitoring of the contract items. These indicators should include means of security and audit that add reliability to the indicator. These indicators should be available for both the client and the supplier of the contract, although the mechanisms of monitoring indicators can be deployed in the client and in the supplier.

What is ITIL?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. In its current form (known as ITILv3 and ITIL 2011 edition), ITIL is published in a series of five core publications, each of which covers an ITSM lifecycle stage. ITILv3 underpins ISO/IEC 20000 (previously BS15000), the International Service Management Standard for IT service management, although differences between the two frameworks do exist.

ITIL describes procedures, tasks and checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.

The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) – now part of the Cabinet Office. Following this move, the ownership is now listed as being with HM Government rather than OGC.

Font: wikipedia.org

IT Helpdesk incident management spreadsheet

In many help desk and service desk environments, especially in small businesses, it’s common not to have any documentation regarding the technical procedures, solutions used to solve certain problems and even control of incidents and requests made ​​in the internal organization. Everything stays in the technician’s head, from remembering a certain service provided to a specific incident and which are still pending requests. I agree, it’s a lot to think about and organize, especially considering that problems generally occur simultaneously across many users ​​. Due to a normal stage of evolution, the help desk will need other practices to better meet the business and its users.

 

The first step for those who have nothing, I recommend that all requests and incidents are documented in your company (Download the IT incident spreadsheet for free by clicking here). With the technical documentation you will not forget any incidents, define the urgency for each incident and you can still organize presetting dates for completion of the incidents and requests.

 

The benefits don’t stop just there, with the data recorded, the technician will have hands on valuable information for analysis, such as: the categories with the highest failure rates, which are the departments  that require more services, number of requests performed in a given period. With data in hand, any decision of strategic nature will be much easier to take.