Service Catalog

[OtisW]

"What are the best practices for structuring a Service Catalog for multiple departments without causing performance issues?"

[Bhimashankar H]

Hi @OtisW

Organize items into logical categories and subcategories like hardware, software, employee service within each catalog.

You can leverage user criteria at the catalog, category and item levels. Reuse the variable by variable sets. Use flow designer to automate the flows.

I would suggest going through below article and post to get better understanding.

ServiceNow Service Catalog Best Practices: Designing and Optimizing Service Offerings 

Organizing catalog by group or similar tasks 

Service Catalog Best practices 

Application Guide: Service Catalog Best Practices 

Thanks,
Bhimashankar H

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[Shashank_Jain]

@OtisW ,

Please keep these points in mind :

Use Multiple Catalogs: Separate catalogs per department (IT, HR, Facilities) to improve organization and user experience.

Leverage User Criteria & Variable Sets: Control access at catalog/item level and reuse variable sets for consistency and easier maintenance.

Design Efficient Workflows: Create clear, item-specific workflows rather than generic ones to streamline fulfillment.

Monitor & Optimize Performance: Regularly review catalog items, scripts, variables, and workflows to identify and fix bottlenecks.

Adopt Granular Taxonomy: Organize catalog items in logical categories/subcategories for easy navigation, balancing detail with manageability.

Hope it helps!

[Sandeep Rajput]

@OtisW 

For structuring a Service Catalog for multiple departments without causing performance issues, some of the best practices include the following:

• Organize the catalog into clear and logical service categories based on departments or service types to simplify navigation and minimize search overhead.
  
• Define detailed service descriptions, SLAs, ownership, costs, and request processes for each service to increase transparency and accountability, which helps reduce queries and load through clear information.
  
• Design the catalog from the end-user perspective, prioritizing user-friendly navigation, search functionality, and accessibility to reduce performance issues caused by poor usability or excessive complex querying.
  
• Regularly update and prune the catalog content to remove obsolete or rarely used services, minimizing clutter and improving system responsiveness.
  
• Implement governance for the catalog to ensure consistency, ownership, and alignment with business goals, which improves maintenance efficiency and prevents performance degradation.
  
• Leverage data on usage patterns to prioritize and optimize popular services, and automate or streamline request fulfillment for common services to reduce bottlenecks.
  
• Integrate the catalog smoothly with other ITSM processes (incident, change, SLA management) to automate workflows and avoid manual process delays.
  
• Use a scalable platform with indexing and caching for service metadata and search results to handle multiple users and queries efficiently.
  

In summary, structure the catalog by department and service categories, optimize for clear, simple user experience, keep content relevant, enforce governance, and leverage automation and data insights—all to avoid system overload and performance problems while supporting multiple departments effectively.

[Bhimashankar H]

Hi @OtisW ,

I hope you saw my reply. 

If my response points you in the right directions, please consider marking it as 'Helpful' & 'Correct'. It will help future readers as well having similar kind of questions and close the thread.

Thanks,
Bhimashankar H