What Top Level Service Catalog Categories do you use in your organizations?

[jonathonbarton]

Hi, all!

We're looking to our community to help guide our discussion of what Categories we might consider using as Top Level Categories for our Enterprise Customer-Facing catalog.

Currently we're using Hardware, Software, Is Something Broken (containing Something Is Broken - an Incident Record Producer), and I Need Something Else (which contains a Generic Service Request REQ/RITM producer)

A PC or Mobile Phone or Tablet or new Keyboard is pretty clearly Hardware.

Visio, MS Project, SnagIt, etc. are pretty clearly Software.

We're struggling with whether a "Cloud" service like a Sharepoint MySite/Skydrive (SP2010/SP2013), Maximo (Web-based app with a user license), ServiceNow ITIL License, etc. counts in the minds of our users as "Software" or if it's an "Account" or something else entirely from the end user's intuitive perspective.

We're also struggling how to intuitively catergorize things like AD account creation/updates, Onboarding, Offboarding, Security Badging, etc.

So, we're reaching out to all of you...

How are you categorizing these services and deliverables within your Service Catalog in your organization?

[poyntzj]

Badly lol

I wait to see what answers you get to give us ideas.

It is an area we know we need ot review, but telling our management and the possible time frame does not go down well

[nluoma]

I'm in the process of tackling this right now, and have been searching for how other users have grouped this. What we have now is a few categories that only have one or two items in them, and a big misc. bucket called "services" that holds the majority of the items. It seems like if we're going to dump everything into one, we should just have a list of all of them alphabetically, with a search option! So, hoping for feedback from the community, here's what we have so far:

• Software Enhancements (requests for changes to legacy software)
• Employee Services (new employee set ups, moves, etc.)
• Hardware (new equipment)
• Software and Access (new software, software configs, access)
• Server Requests (new servers, virtual servers, etc.)
• Retail Onboarding Services (this is a custom app/process)
• It's Broken (password resets, and incident creation)
• Services (everything else)

Any advice, suggestions, looks at what your organization has set up?

[Heidi Rawson1]

Should "It's Broken" be part of the Service Catalog? Service Catalog requests create a REQ. Those items should create an INC?

[Brad Tilton]

Great question! I don't have an awesome set of high level categories to offer, but I will say that there are a couple of things to think about when going through this process. The first is that ServiceNow let's you have items in multiple categories, so that gives you some flexibility. For example, let's say you have both telecom and hardware top level categories and an iPhone is an item you offer. As an end user, I might look in both places for the iPhone item and it may be a good idea to put that item in both categories.

I would also not overlook the search functionality. I've seen customers spend lots of time and energy on developing a categorization structure, and not think about search at all. The Service Catalog has some great searching capability built in so I would make sure you spend some time testing search, making sure your items have the right keywords and that the appropriate items are showing up.

I hope we see some great examples from people on this discussion thread and good luck to you!