Costs & Benefits
Never touch a running IT service catalogue?
by Rene Funke
IT service catalogues pay off - if they are regularly updated. Our projects show that without constant maintenance, the gap between best in class and average is widening.
About ten years ago, IT service catalogues came into fashion. But over time, services, technologies and contexts have changed - just think of cloud computing. What was best practice back then is now quite often far away from actual market conditions.
The fact that old service catalogues no longer fit current technical trends and requirements has recently also been shown in our consulting projects with the Metrics Service Library (MSL) - the de facto market standard for IT services, which is regularly updated with market information. Of particular interest here are the costs for the provision of IT services: The savings potential through an up-to-date service catalogue is higher than generally assumed, even in professionalised service organisations (see chart).
Of course, the figures cannot be transferred 1:1 to all organisations because of the individual starting points and goals. Nevertheless, our project experience and the key figures in the Data Lake show that the gap between best in class and average is widening. And this applies not only to costs, but also to quality, complexity and volume of IT services.
Two practical examples: The life cycles and maintenance phases of hardware can be compared directly with other companies to see when the ideal moment for a refresh has been reached - or whether it has already been missed. In addition, future-proof IT service catalogues must take the topic of cloud services into account. This is the only way to justify decisions on ideal IT provisioning. After all, it's not only prices and service levels that change, but also operating costs due to automated processes in the cloud.
