GovernIT

Towards a uniform Service Catalog definition

Major product and service companies in the ITSM space have announced a collaborative effort to define standards for service portfolios and catalogs.

ITIL v3 introduced service portfolio, catalog, and request processes, which are the bedrock of the ITIL framework. However, there are no standard definitions of what constitutes a service, how to define and measure a service catalog etc.

The SPACL (The Service Portfolio and Catalog Language) Standards Consortium (www.spacl.info)  is a consortium formed by BMC Software Inc, Frontrange, IBM, NewScale, and Planview to formally develop a standard that is implementation-independent, open and interoperable.

The SPACL publications are still in early draft stage and open for feedback. You can download them here

Public sector drives Process Framework adoption

The much-maligned public sector organizations, such as defense and healthcare organizations have always been the force behind the development of industry standard best practices and frameworks.

CMM and later CMMI were developed for the Department of Defense, PRINCE2 for the UK Government etc.

In another interesting development, the police department of Lincolnshire have adopted the use of ITIL for service management and have acquired the necessary implementation software (Link to article)

When most police forces around the world are struggling on proving their efficiency and effectiveness to tax payers, the Lincolnshire police have shown that it is possible to do so in a fair and transparent manner.

It would be interesting to see how the general populace feels when the data for incident management are published and if there would be some genuine SLAs possible. However, it would be extremely difficult to get an idea if the numbers reflect good performance or not, since there are no parallels for comparison!

Tags: IT Service Management, ITIL, Police