Application Guide: Service Catalog Best Practices

[priyankalim]

This guide gives you a collection of best practices for a successful implementation of Service Catalog.

Service Catalog provides a view of available, pre-defined products and services offered by corporate departments such as IT, HR, and others in your company.

The consumer-like storefront simplifies self-help for your users, allowing them to interact with other line-of-business services more quickly and easily.

The Service Catalog provides current details, status, interfaces, and dependences between services in the environment. The Service Catalog also supports the evolving needs of other service management processes.

The Service Catalog works with the following ServiceNow applications:

Request Management

The Service Catalog is an entry point for users to request products and services from the IT organization, including shared services such as HR, Facilities, Finance, etc. These products and services are exposed as catalog items.

Incident Management & Change Management

The Service Catalog also provides users with a way to submit incidents or questions to the IT or shared services organizations. It can provide users with a way to request standard changes, for example, server reboots. This is done using record producers.

Service Portal

The Service Portal is an end-user-facing website that provides an alternative and simplified interface to access features and functionality from the ServiceNow platform. The Service Catalog is an application that can be exposed on the Service Portal.

Getting the Greatest Value from Service Catalog

Design your Service Catalog to benefit the business.

The Service Catalog is designed to make your business operation more efficient by accelerating the time to delivery and/or resolution of most common interactions between requestors and fulfillers. For this reason, it should not be created in the image of the IT organization, but it should reflect the needs of the business.

Design the Service Catalog through the lens of your end user.

Design the Service Catalog with your company culture in mind. Strive to meet end users' expectations for an optimal service experience and to maximize productivity in their jobs.

Continue involving end users and improving the process for them.

Conduct follow-up focus group or workshop sessions to make sure that the Service Catalog continues to be efficient and effective. For example, continuous improvements can be sought and made on the user interface, user experience, search results, and shopping cart experience.

Get Started: Design your Service Catalog

Let's look at some steps to get you started using the application's most fundamental functionality.

1. Define and assign roles.

There are several key roles involved in the use of the Service Catalog:

Service Owner

Owns a specific service. The service owner coordinates with the catalog manager and editor to add services to the catalog. They have overall responsibility for ensuring that the service provision functions smoothly and meets users' expectations. Each service must have a designated owner.

We strongly recommend that service owners work with a team of business analysts, catalog managers, catalog editors, fulfillers, and ServiceNow administrators to build and maintain their products and services.

Service Catalog Manager

Determines what goes into the catalog. The manager also ensures that the operational services on the Service Catalog are recorded, accurate, up-to-date, and available for view to the appropriate end users.

Catalog Editor

Manages the creation, modification, publication, and deletion of catalog items.

Service Fulfiller

Fulfills user requests on a day-to-day basis.

End User

The person who requests the product or service items.

2. Identify and define items to offer.

Work with your shared services organizations (IT, HR, etc.) to get a comprehensive understanding of what they do, and of the products and services they offer. In addition, examine the history of requests made to IT and to shared services.

The best practice to define what items to offer is to start by identifying those that are:

• Existing and well-defined — These are current services with fully defined structures and fulfillment processes.
• Most frequently requested — The most common requests for each individual organization (IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, etc.), determined by analyzing the history of previous requests.
• High priority — These services are critical for the organization.

Once the services have been identified, clearly define the fulfillment process and its tasks, approval steps, and the responsible individuals or groups.

3. Define the main properties of your items.

Now that you have identified your items, you can start to create them and define their main properties.

Name & Description

To ensure a great service ordering experience, name and describe items in the Service Catalog using terminology that users across the company recognize, which may not be the terms used by the IT organization.

Survey the company and figure out the search terms people use frequently, and the results they expect with those terms.

Market these services with descriptions that equip your end users with the essential information they need to request the right item.

You may require the approval of managers before some items can be ordered. For these items, make sure to clearly state that approval is needed in the description space, so that users have the opportunity to reconsider before placing the order.

Images

Add high quality images to your items to give your end users a clear picture of what they are ordering.

Pricing

Prices and any additional charges for items can be defined, providing transparency to end users.

Tags

Assigning tags to items increases the relevance and accuracy of searches to help users quickly locate an item. You can assign appropriate tags to catalog items using the 'Meta' field. Metadata is a great tool to account for popular words and phrases users utilize to find certain items that are not in the item's name or description. These tags are not visible to end users.

Workflow

Using the Workflow application, build   workflows to automate the fulfillment processes you defined, and assign them to your catalog items.

4. Add variables.

Variables refer to the options your users can choose from to refine their selection when ordering an item. There are numerous variable types.

For example, an iPhone 6S can come with variables including color (Space Gray, Silver, etc.), allocated carrier (AT&T, Verizon, etc.), and storage (32GB, 128GB). Users can select the appropriate option from each variable to get the precise item they need.

Variable Sets

Variables can also be grouped into a variable set. A variable set refers to a defined set of variables that are relevant to more than one item and shared between them.

For example, administrative questions including contact number, delivery address, etc. can be combined into one variable set, and be applied to more than one catalog item as necessary. This way, you do not have to create the same individual variables on each item.

There are three main best practices to creating variables:

Keep questions understandable.

When asking users to make their selection, keep the questions simple and understandable.

For options that may not be familiar to users, use Tooltips for a quick mouse-over hint and Annotations for a more detailed description.

For example, when you are asked to enter your credit card information online, there is typically a hint next to the CVV question that explains what it is.

Keep the interface user-friendly.

Variables can be hidden and only appear based on prior selections. For example, checking the option for a computer case could prompt an additional question about its type or color.

While it can be effective to hide questions until they are needed, do not overburden your users with too many nested questions.

Ask only necessary questions.

Do not ask requestors to enter information that can be found in the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) or elsewhere in the instance. For example, basic information such as Department, Manager, etc. can be auto-populated, but remain editable if needed.

5. Define Service Catalog security.

You can apply user criteria to an item to define which users can have access to it. User criteria allow you to group a specific set of users based on multiple parameters such as group, department, company, role, or location. Once a specific user criteria has been defined, it can be leveraged in multiple areas within the platform.

6. Organize your items.

Users can find items through the Service Catalog homepage, either by browsing through different categories or by searching.

Service Catalog enables you to organize items into multiple categories and subcategories to facilitate access and use by all users. Best practice is to create these categories in a user-centric way, while avoiding complex category trees.

Users typically use the Search function to locate products or services. As explained in Step 3, make sure that catalog items have meaningful names, descriptions, and tags so they can be easily located from a search.

7. Leverage reports and dashboards.

ServiceNow provides a robust engine to generate charts, graphs, maps, lists, and many other types of reports. Reports can be displayed on a dashboard, published to a URL, and scheduled to be run and distributed at regular intervals.

The ServiceNow platform comes with numerous predefined reports that provide data on Service Catalog requests, as well as other applications and features, such as incident, problem, and change management.

You can create your own reports. For example, you may create a report that shows what items users request most frequently. This metric allows you to make these items easier for end users to access, perhaps with a 'Most Frequently Requested Items section,' without having to search for them.

You can combine multiple reports into a dashboard. This enables you to get a quick view of critical metrics that measure the performance and usage of the Service Catalog, and the opportunity to consider how to improve it.

You can create more than one dashboard for your Service Catalog. For example, you may design a Service Owner dashboard and a Fulfiller dashboard, and display the reports that are most pertinent and relevant to each role.

8. Run a Pilot Test.

Introduce the Service Catalog by running a pilot focus group or workshop with a limited audience.

This process is highly valuable, not only for receiving useful feedback to make modifications prior to full implementation, but also to develop champions of the application.

One way to do this is to identify the 5-10 items or request types that are critical to the success of the Service Catalog, and a group of key stakeholders that you expect to use the application. Conduct sessions for potential users to test the Service Catalog and provide critical feedback.

Potential focus topics could include: UI and taxonomy, shopping cart experience, service catalog process and fulfillment, and general user feedback. Other focus topics may be useful to your organization as well.

9. Roll out the application to your team.

Use the Champion Enablement materials to plan and roll out Service Catalog.

Additional Resources

Service Catalog: How to quickly realize value webinar.

For questions about planning and designing an effective Service Catalog, check out this workshop from Knowledge 16, ServiceNow's biggest conference.

When you are ready to dive in and get technical, refer to our product documentation.

To get additional support and insights on how other customers use Service Catalog, check out our Community.

[MichaelM2]

The workshop from Knowledge 16 mentioned in the last paragraph is not available unfortunately. Where would I find it?

[janders]

I'm also looking for this workshop.