IT Service Catalog: Build a Service Taxonomy in 4 Easy Steps
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IT Service Catalog: Build a Service Taxonomy in 4 Easy Steps
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IT Service Catalog - Service Taxonomy What services do we offer? How do we organize them? How can we make them "customer-centric?" What is a good starting point? Successful IT Service Catalogs have well-organized services. The services taxonomy, or framework is the key to organizing and managing your services effectively. Please join us to learn how to build a good service taxonomy in 4 logical steps, as well as 3 key mistakes to avoid. We will also briefly demonstrate our beautiful and innovative customer-centric IT Service Catalog (built on ServiceNow).
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IT Service Catalog: Build a Service Taxonomy in 4 Easy Steps
- 1. Build a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps PLUS 3 Key Mistakes to Avoid
- 2. 2 Speaker Bios DON CASSON, CEO, EVERGREEN SYSTEMS Don has led Evergreen Systems since its founding in 1997. Over the years he has spoken at conferences, authored white papers and been interviewed for numerous industry periodicals. Contact: dcasson@evergreensys.com JEFF BENEDICT, ITSM PRACTICE MANAGER, EVERGREEN SYSTEMS Jeff manages the ITSM practice at Evergreen and has worked with ITSM tools for 15+ years. Jeff is an active contributor to the Evergreen Blog and Twitter. (twitter.com/JeffSBenedict) Contact: jeff.benedict@evergreensys.com
- 3. 3 Today’s Agenda • About Evergreen • Benefits of a Service Taxonomy • Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps • 3 Key Mistakes to Avoid • Evergreen’s Beautiful, User-Centric Service Catalog (built on ServiceNow) • Possible Next Steps / Q&A
- 4. • 80-person U.S. IT Consulting Firm • Worked with hundreds of Mid-Market and Fortune 1000 Companies • Full lifecycle firm with deep ITSM / ITIL transformation experience • One of Top 5 ServiceNow U.S. partners • Primary Focus – “Customer-Centric IT Service Management” 4 About Evergreen Systems Sample ClientsQuick Facts
- 6. What About the Customer? Evolving… IT’s Value Customer Experience 6
- 7. 7 A Service is outcome that meets a customer’s need well enough to justify the purchase price What is a Service Taxonomy? A Service Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification of services
- 8. 8 Attributes of a Taxonomy Classification of things – often from general to specific Generally organizes things into groups Includes the principles underlying the classification Parts of a whole Parent - child relationship can be multi-parent
- 9. 9 Benefits of Building a Service Taxonomy CONSISTENCY CLARITY SIMPLICITY ALIGNMENT PRIORITY REUSE
- 10. 10 Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps Step 1 define the purpose how do we define it? why do we need it? who is served by it?
- 11. 11 Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps Step 2 set the foundation who is involved & how? what is the process for building & changing? how do we document it? how do we manage demand?
- 12. 12 Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps Step 3 create the framework From general to specific works well group logically define from the service user’s perspective Category Group Sub Group Service
- 13. 13 Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps Step 3(a) follow good framework practices 1) try to target 7 or less items per category 2) try to limit the number of hops from category to actual service from 4-6 3) going broader at the end is ok 4) work to simplify, use few words, define in the customer’s language Category Group Sub Group Service
- 14. 14 Sample High Level Taxonomy
- 15. 15 Building a Service Taxonomy in 4 Steps Step 4 begin building key services
- 16. 16 3 Pitfalls to Avoid IT navel gazing don’t go all “wild west” on it don’t claim victory too early
- 17. 17 Evergreen’s User-Centric Service Catalog POWERED BY SERVICENOW
- 18. 18 ServiceNow Service Components The objects and their relationships that drive the definition of a service Business Services CI’s in the database Busines s Services In/Out of Scope Category Parent Categories Service Offering Service Offering Commitments & subscriptions Commitments & subscriptions SLAs (Avail & Response) SLAs (Avail & Response)
- 19. 19 Service Definition Approach The following steps may help in getting moving with your business service definitions Define all Business Services – Outline the basic information about the services offered to customers Steps to follow Define the scope of the services – Clearly define the scope of each Business Service. What’s in scope and what’s out of scope. Service Offerings – Define all Service Offerings and variations per Business Service (ie Bronze, Silver and Gold) Pricing – Define pricing model on Business Services and configure prices on Service Offerings Commitments – Define all the Service Commitments per Service Offering and linkages to SLAs Relationships – Define relations between Business Services and CI’s. Outline service health relationships
- 20. One-Day, Private Service Catalog Workshop – $3,950 Arrange a private demo of our “Metro Style” End-User Portal – available for $15,000 as an update set. Possible Next Steps? http://www.evergreensys.com 20
- 21. 21 • Questions? • Thank you for your time. Check out our blog for our latest thinking! http://www.evergreensys.com/blog IT webinars, white papers, tools and more at: http://www.evergreensys.com/it-webinars- whitepapers-evergreen-systems Wrap-Up
Notas do Editor
- Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us! I am Don Casson, CEO of Evergreen and with me is Jeff Benedict who heads up Evergreen’s ITSM practice.
- If you are new to our webinar series, welcome. If you are a past attendee thanks for joining us again. Our goal is to share valuable information & insights you can use in your planning and activities right now. The question we will explore today is, “How do we go about building a service taxonomy?” Here is our agenda- After a very little bit about Evergreen, we will look at the definition and benefits of a taxonomy, a 4 step building process and 3 mistakes to avoid. Beyond that we will briefly demonstrate our always evolving view of an advanced, user centric Service Catalog, built on ServiceNow. Then we will answer some questions if you have any. At any time during the webinar you may submit a question using the Q&A function.
- Evergreen is a US based consulting firm and we have worked with hundreds of mid market and Fortune 1000 companies to improve their IT Service Management execution. We are a full lifecycle firm, or in the words of one customer, “you have both process and technology in one company.” We are one of the leading ServiceNow partners and have over a decade of domain experience in each area of the ServiceNow portfolio, but we have a particularly heavy focus on customer centric IT Service Mgmt.
- A lot of you have or may eventually use ServiceNow, it is a great, flexible platform. This is what the end user experience looks like out of the box versus Evergreen’s out of the box. Like the eye doctor says during an examination – this, or this, which is better? Which might your customer prefer?
- AT Evergreen WE THINK CONVENTIONAL ITSM WISDOM IS BASICALLY WRONG For the most part ITSM has been done the same old way for the past decade – incident, problem, change and a little knowledge. At the end of it, we may be running a little better – but so what? What about the customer? Are we really making a difference in their lives? Are we delivering them any more value? Are we waiting to phase 3 to even think about them? This old model is broken. We need to start with the customer in Phase 1. If you haven’t already, NOW is the time. For the past two years at Evergreen we have been working very hard on exactly this – focusing from the customer in, not from IT out. Our inspirations have been Apple, Amazon and Google to name a few. We see both IT and the customer’s experience evolving hand in hand from the start – not as an afterthought. On the left side of this slide we see IT maturing – going from silos of IT activities to delivering IT services, to being the engine behind delivery of any services. On the right side the customer experience is evolving as well, from what I call “not very good” to being able to access a thoughtful and complete portfolio of IT services, to being empowered by a true digital workspace driving their productivity and creativity.
- Let’s start with some definition of terms. What is a Service? An outcome that meets a customer’s needs well enough to justify the purchase price. What is the purchase price? It’s not just money. It is the total investment the customer has to make to get the service – time, energy and money. It also considers ease of use, quality and complexity as the customer moves through the process, just like you do when you are the customer. (For example, think about when you were trying to buy something on line and the process was poor – perhaps you were asked to go back and forth between screens, and information you had already entered got dropped. You abandoned the shopping cart right?) A Service Taxonomy is logical, repeatable way to classify the services we want to offer, as well as the ones we might want to offer. The taxonomy of homo sapiens here is a pretty good type of taxonomy model for IT Services – the classification goes from very broad to specific, from millions to few.
- A taxonomy is a logical and extensible way of classifying things. Most taxonomies organize things into logical categories, groups, and even sub groups as the classification gets more and more specific. Taxonomies don’t have to be hierarchical groups, they can be alphabetic listing of things as well. The best type of taxonomy for you is the type that is most useful in creating and managing the services you want to offer. It is very helpful if the taxonomy “includes” or carries with it the principles of classification in the framework itself. One common way to do this is to use self defining terms – ie – a term generally understood to be the same thing by a high percentage of the target customer for that group of services. For example, the term “high power desktop computer” is more self defining than “compute hardware 64 bit Linux OS v5.” The parts of a taxonomy are meant to be parts of a whole. At the highest level the framework should capture the broadest view of what you see as potentially within the scope of your effort. Of course the taxonomy can be grown or shrunk later – it is never locked down. But it is easier to start with a broad view as there is no downside to it, you don’t have to use all of it right away, and you will minimize any re-classification efforts downstream that could come from changing the taxonomy. Here is an interesting note. It is possible for a child object in a taxonomy to have multiple parents, just as in ITIL a CI can be a component of many services. You could have a category like HR, with a group training, and a sub group IT Training. At the same time IT Training could be a group or sub group under the category IT Customer Services. It is the same item.
- So what are the benefits of having a Service Taxonomy? Here are 6 good ones. Since we will have a number of constituents - customers and providers - with varying interest in building and maintaining our taxonomy, having a commonly understood way to group & classify items helps in the CONSISTENT definition & categorization of services. This consistency also brings CLARITY amongst the constituents as a strong, general, group understanding of the use of the framework develops. Being able to “see” and handle the framework easily from high to low helps to “shine a light” on redundant or unnecessary services thereby SIMPLIFYING the Service Catalog as well as ensuring individual services are built in the most simple, reusable form. A well understood classification system makes it much easier to ALIGN services in logical groups – helping to eliminate cultural or organizational biases. The classification scheme, along with a consistent way of ranking the potential value & cost of new incoming demand helps provide better, less biased insight in defining PRIORITIES. A clear, consistently understood framework with its attendant services makes it easier to identify services or sub services that can be combined to create new services – driving up beneficial REUSE.
- While there is a whole lot of guidance out there around Service Catalogs and even Service Portfolios, there doesn’t seem to be very much guidance around IT Service Taxonomies. And yet, we have had had dozens of clients ask us about best practices in service taxonomies in just the past few months. So here are our 4 steps to building a service taxonomy. Because of the lack of “standards” on the topic, we need to lay some groundwork to ensure what we build is durable. We have already discussed the high level definition of a service taxonomy, so for Step 1 – what is our purpose? For starters, here is a working definition you may use. “The purpose of the Service Taxonomy is to provide a commonly agreed upon classification framework that allows us to manage a portfolio of services over their useful lives.” Why do we need it? To provide consistency, clarity, simplicity, alignment, priority and reuse for the services offered to our customers. Who is served by it? This is up to you and defined by how broadly you construe it. Here is a a useful tip. Typically, any given functional unit within a business provides something to someone. So they have customers, and they have services. For a customer of HR, the ability to get 401K information is a service. For the customer of IT, the ability to reset a password is a service. For the customer of the server compliance team (who could be a server admin), the ability to launch an automated patch update process is a service.
- The Service Taxonomy needs to be durable and is critical for services success. For Step 2 we begin with the governance team – once we have a view as to how broad our taxonomy is, we can identify the key customer and provider groups that can form our governance committee. A simple charter along with the definition of how the taxonomy is defined and changed will suffice to start. Then a small working group of 3 to 4 (emphasis on “working”) people will define and document the taxonomy, interacting with the governance group on a monthly basis. For many IT organizations, the framework is really about IT services, and even more specifically “customer facing” IT services. This is fine – non IT service groups like HR and Facilities can be added pretty easily later as there is minimal risk of having to reclassify services – not much overlap. how do we manage demand? Once a service catalog is visible, especially if it has a beautiful and functional user interface – demand for new services can grow quickly – both from IT and non IT sources. You need a new service requested demand intake funnel. This can be built in a simple spreadsheet and has two main perspectives – benefit & cost. On the benefit side you weight the value of a potential service – how many can / will use it? How does it benefit the business? How much time does it save? What if any strategic impact does it have? On the cost side – you weight the cost & risk of a potential service - what will it cost to develop? - consider reuse here – do we already have a service that does most of what is needed? How much complexity / risk of failure is there in the potential development? Then you combine both sides for a calculated value score. This gives you a basis for communicating priorities in a rational way – to requesters who naturally think their needs are the highest priority.
- While all steps are important –this is where the taxonomy framework itself is actually built. We have found that a hierarchical framework like the classification of a species works very well for IT Services. This approach goes from General to specific, from Category to Group to Sub group to Service. So how do we group logically? We have to consider both the customers and the providers to get good service taxonomy groupings. For example – let’s say we are working on the customer facing part of our service taxonomy, and we want to have a high level category related to getting access to things and security considerations. We would go to the providers and find out what “services” they think they provide to their “customers.” Then we would talk to the customers to refine what is offered (what really is a service to them) and then define it in the most simple way, easily understood by the customer.
- Here are some good general framework practices to follow. Some of these are not unlike what you do to create a good, new incident classification schema. Try to target 7 or less selections per category. Try to limit the number of hops from highest level category to actual service from 4-6. Bear in mind – the schema is a balancing exercise in breadth and depth. Going broader at the end is not all bad – you might even have 1-0-15 items (services) under a sub group because you are drilling down to the customers real focused interest level so they will be ok with more options. Then work to simplify, use as few words as possible, and define the services in the customers’ terms.
- Use it! Try it out. There is nothing like building out a dozen good representative services, placing them where you think they belong in the taxonomy and learning from it. This will help polish your taxonomy quickly. If you want guidance on how to build great services – well, we just happen to have a webinar in the archives you can watch that tells you how to do that.
- Ok, so I wanted to have a little fun with this slide. There used to be a comic strip called Pogo, and one of his famous lines was this, “we have met the enemy and it is us.” It is true that the big pitfalls are the ones we create ourselves – out of our inherent “IT nature.” In truth they can be the hardest as we often don’t even see them. IT navel gazing is looking IT out rather than customer in. You cannot design services customers want and need if you don’t talk to them. I realize you think you know what customers want, but how? Start and sustain a dialogue with some key customers as you go down the path of offering IT services – make it a part of the process you follow for success. don’t go all “wild west” on it. In IT if some is good, more is better. When we have a new, exciting idea or project we go gangbusters. We do know how to build a lot of stuff fast and can’t wait to start. So we could build hundreds of “rifle shot” services really fast – with no consistency, disciple, or premeditation. The we would have a confused mess with lots of duplicative services. Slow down, be more premeditated, build with enterprise durability in mind. don’t claim victory too early. Creating and implementing a taxonomy is the easy part – it is just a framework to hang services off of. Building the service offering and then delivering the services well - in a way customers love and use them is the hard part.
- If you found this interesting and wonder what might be a logical next step, here are a few options. If you are interested in our advanced Employee Self Service Portal, it is available now as a ServiceNow update set for only $15,000. Perhaps you would like a deeper dive demo for you and your team. Within the next couple of weeks we will have a self service portal demo you will be able to log into and play with. Or perhaps you are considering a broader Service Catalog initiative but aren’t sure where to start and how to get your team all on the same page. Evergreen offers a one day, private Service Catalog Workshop on your site which educates your team, uncovers your key business drivers, and creates a logical roadmap for going forward. You can literally save months of effort in consensus building and get your program moving. Best of all its only $3950, barely covering the cost of travel. Lately, we are being asked a lot to lead a 1 to 2 week strategic roadmap engagements to plan for service catalog, portfolio, and service taxonomy efforts. We would be happy to discuss any further interest you might have.
- Check out our blog for our latest thinking! http://www.evergreensys.com/blog IT webinars, white papers, tools and more at: http://www.evergreensys.com/it-webinars-whitepapers-evergreen-systems Evergreen Systems IT Consulting. IT Service Management has been a primary focus for 17 years. Regardless of the technology your company has invested in to help manage and automate IT Operations, Evergreen can help: ServiceNow, HP, and BMC experience…and more. Evergreen Systems is a ServiceNow Reseller, Authorized Training Partner and a Preferred Implementation Partner operating in both the commercial and government markets.