Pros and cons of Catalog Item Designer

[Victoria Kondra]

There have been discussions held with respect to Catalog Item Designer usage. Some companies have found this tool quite useful for its operations, whereas others struggle and cannot make the public embrace the concept and get Service Catalog development off the developers' shoulders.  

Let’s try to understand the essence of the issue and see what can be done to help those who struggle with Catalog Item Designer adoption. First, let’s consider Catalog Item Designer benefits, main limitations and see where the issues appear in its adoption.  

We know that the main benefit of Catalog Item Designer is to offload and speed up the development process through delegation of duties by utilizing roles of Catalog Manager and Catalog Editor, where Catalog Managers and Catalog Editors can use the catalog item designer to: 

• Create new items within a category they are assigned to;
• Create questions, approvals, tasks, and sections, for the item;
• Publish items to their specific category after review and all this is feasible without extra time dedicated to the development process in terms of resources (developers) and time (sprint/release durations). 

It seems to be an easy and straightforward concept, however, within usage it was noted that it has few limitations in particular the following: 

• There is a need to create, educate and manage group of Catalog Managers and Catalog Editors within organization, so that the concept of Item Designer is used successfully;  
• Since there is a chance to request a category for specific catalog item to apply Item Designer, there is a risk that without proper management and guidance Service Catalog might become a mess due to uncontrol creation of categories to support Item Designer concept;  
• Questions type vs. variables type differ, the latter has more options and features to offer, for example, Lookup Select Box – a variable type which allows an end user to select several options from one drop-down; 
• Coding -  UI policies and client scripts are not supported by the Item Designer. To implement these more advanced functions, you need to use the service catalog features for creating items.  This means that you cannot hide or make a question appear on the form based on some condition; 
• Approvals are straight forward process in Item Designer, you can do only limited amount of coding to set an approver within your item, for example you cannot set an approval based on the specific selection in question on the form;  
• Backend limitations – since there is no client scripts you cannot further advanced backend of your form to benefit your fulfillers with the questions only visible to them;
• Update set and testing - Item Designer is used directly in Prod., so there are no update sets and only a limited amount of testing can be performed. That also means that the company needs to perform cloning on a regular basis to keep instances in sync. 

To conclude, Item Designer cannot be used for creation of complex or sophisticated forms with complex approval process, sophisticated UI performance or forms that require additional actions on back-end from fulfillers. 

But, it can be easily used for streamlined, repeatable and simple processes, such as, for example, training management or hardware offering. For example, let’s imagine Lisa is a course coordinator in company ABC and she is responsible for recruiting internal employees for language and software courses to benefit the company both financially (increase revenue from courses) and operationally (increase employees’ productivity). In order to get count of employees interested, manage costs and prepare for the courses overall, Lisa needs specific information about each participant as well as his/her manager’s approval to account for the course costs. After organizational analysis it appears that Lisa needs to have two forms within Service Catalog to manage language and software courses intakes. There are two approaches she can take: 

• Ask the developers to develop such forms during next release, which means that it will take a month prior she starts getting required data, plus she will need to dedicate her time to work with a business analyst on requirements; 
• Become familiar with the concept of Catalog Item Designer, sign up for Catalog Manager/Catalog Editor roles and create her own items herself, with the help of Now YouTube Channel and Now Learning. This can be done in couple of day since Lisa will be the creator and manager of these two forms she will be able to do updates any time and won’t need to wait for a new release to see them applied;

As we saw, the concept of Catalog Item Designer regardless of its limitations can be quite beneficial for an organization of medium and large size where development cycles can take up to a month of time. On the other hand, for such organizations it is crucial to have a responsible and knowledgeable Service Catalog Process Owner who can effectively guide and supervise growth of Service Catalog, so that it’s a genual and controlled process which will not let a mess into a Service Catalog of the organization.

[Priya Shid1]

Thanks.These is helpful!!

[Victoria Kondra]

Thanks Priya! If it's possible mark helpful too! Many thanks!

[Les1]

Thank you Victoria for this run through contrast of Catalog item builder vs traditional item build!

[isabellafredian]

Everything mentioned here can be covered by Catalog Builder. We can actively ask Item designers to move to Catalog Builder.