Business white paper

One click away from IT servicesOne single IT service catalog

Business white paper | One click away from IT services

Table of contents

3 Executive summary

3 Global trend: IT as a service broker

4 The service catalog: A marketing tool for IT

5 Enter the aggregated IT service catalog—the one-stop shop for IT products and services

6 IT service catalogs as part of an ITSM suite

6 IT service catalogs as part of a CMP toolset

6 Standalone IT service catalogs

7 Requirements for the modern IT service catalog

8 Why service aggregation and not consolidation?

9 Composite service bundling

9 Smart routing of service requests from the catalog to underlying fulfillment systems

10 About HP Propel

11 Key takeaways

3

Your business wants only one IT service catalog

A single, standalone IT service catalog ensures that services from multiple IT catalogs are only clicks away.

With lines of business increasingly purchasing or renting IT services from external parties rather than waiting for their internal IT organizations to build them, IT needs to become a service broker to get ahead of user demand. This requires aggregating all available services into a single IT service catalog that enables users to access, order, and consume offerings with just a few clicks.

Executive summary

Today’s IT departments need to assume the role of service brokers to cater more successfully to users who have become accustomed to the elegant interfaces of consumer technology. By deploying a single, aggregated catalog of catalogs—that puts users just clicks away from the services they want on the front end and automates fulfillment processes on the back end—IT can delight users, as well as better serve the business.

Global trend: IT as a service broker

We live in a digital world. We increasingly bank online rather than visit a physical branch. We read electronic books rather than ones printed on paper. We shop online. We file tax returns online. We can even configure our own cars online. Today, the software application is the product—the banking application, the government websites, the automobile feature catalogs, and more. And most of us are accustomed to easily finding, personalizing, and using these digital services.

But we’re also in an era where technology is moving so fast that even IT professionals can’t keep up with it. Gone are the days when IT could hope to deliver all the services that a business required with limited internal staff. The result: an increasingly decentralized approach to IT with much of technology spending occurring outside the purview of the formal IT organization.

It’s time for IT to act as a service broker. However, the old role of IT as a service provider does not go away. IT organizations can continue to build those applications and services that give the business a competitive advantage. They’ll do this for many years to come.

Business white paper | One click away from IT services

IT is no longer only about technology. It’s certainly not about forcing corporate technology standards down users’ throats. It is about meeting users’ needs in a way that also promotes the health, vibrancy, and safety of the business. And it’s very much about the experience.

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Simultaneously, IT will broker external technology products and services on behalf of the lines of business. This involves keeping up to date on the services that exist on the market, understanding the capabilities they deliver, assessing and managing suppliers, validating security, and understanding and enforcing service levels. Then, on purchase and deployment of a service, IT needs to validate the accessibility and security of the service, its maintenance of integrations with other solutions, and compliance with service levels.

With IT acting as both a service broker and the provider of all IT services, the IT service catalog becomes critical. As the point of nexus between IT, suppliers, and users, the service catalog helps IT satisfy users—and the fact is, IT cannot be successful without satisfying users. After all, IT does not simply provide technology. It provides an experience, and its image and success is increasingly judged based on users’ perceptions of that experience.

Consumerization is impacting how IT systems need to deliver services to users. We increasingly expect, when at work, to just as easily and conveniently engage with corporate IT departments to order and consume IT services. We also expect our IT organizations to provide us with the latest and greatest services to grow revenue, create value, and improve the customer experience.

Providing a modern, intuitive, and actionable self-service catalog thus plays a big role in the overall success of IT.

The service catalog: A marketing tool for IT

ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) taught IT about the importance of service catalogs.1 Many IT organizations already offer service request catalogs as a means for users to order available services.

Service catalogs are the way IT:• Makes users aware of what IT offers

• Communicates the value of what IT does to the business

• Enables users to order services into delivery options and timelines, in a transparent and informed way

However, in today’s new user-centric world, ITIL is not enough. We live in a service society. Our experiences using products and services—as much as our interactions with the organizations that provide them to us—shape our view of value, define our levels of satisfaction, and form the basis for our feelings of loyalty.

More often than not, IT provides multiple user-facing service catalogs to its users. In such cases, users frequently get confused. Which catalog do they use to procure, for example, a mobile phone for business? It can also be annoying to have to jump from catalog to catalog, to get everything they need—for example; the mobile phone itself, the SIM card, and a subscription to the company’s mobility provider might all have to be obtained from different catalogs.

Because of this complexity, developers are sometimes not aware that their IT group provides platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, and so routinely engage with public cloud providers to purchase and procure those kind of test environments—without the recommended security and governance controls.

1 itilnews.com/ITIL_Service_Catalogue_How_to_produce_a_Service_Catalogue.html

Why does IT still need a self-service IT catalog?• It serves as the primary marketing tool for a

service-oriented IT organization

• It describes services offerings, configuration options, price, subscription terms, delivery options, the service levels, and the support conditions in a language users understand

• It acts as the vehicle for users to request services

• It shapes the user experience by allowing them to consume the services at agreed-upon price, quality, and service levels

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Moreover, sometimes, IT service catalogs use spreadsheets or even Word documents as their interfaces. These simply cannot be considered as compelling to users in this day and age.

An even worse scenario is a lack of automation on the back end: manual processes can cause IT to fall short of service delivery commitments, with the result that even more trouble tickets must be created. In today’s user-centric world, automated and efficient service delivery is table stakes. IT organizations that still engage in custom or semi-manual service deliveries are gambling with their relationships with the lines of business, and individual users.

Enter the aggregated IT service catalog—the one-stop shop for IT products and services

Your users are accustomed to Amazon, which presents an entire universe of diverse shopping choices within a single catalog. IT needs to provide this consumer-type experience. Even if your IT organization possesses multiple user-facing service catalogs, it must present a single, unified catalog that allows users to search through services and order, or subscribe to the ones they want.

Gartner2 classifies IT service catalogs into three groups: standalone; integrated as part of an IT service management (ITSM) suite; or part of a cloud management provider (CMP) tools.

2 IT Service Catalog Tools Buyer’s Guide, Chris Matchett, Jeffrey M. Brooks, Gartner, March 2014

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IT service catalogs as part of an ITSM suite

This bottom-up approach to building IT service catalogs treats the catalog as an extension to an existing system, whose primary purpose is to automate key ITIL processes. Its primary characteristics are:

• The IT service catalog is bundled with the ITSM suite. If IT moves to another ITSM system, the service catalog has to be replaced—and users may typically need to learn a new catalog interface

• If the ITSM catalog is not integrated with other catalogs and fulfillment systems—for example, with IT asset management or cloud provisioning systems—then users can only order a narrow set of ITSM services

IT service catalogs as part of a CMP toolset

This bottom-up approach to building service catalog is done as an extension of a cloud provisioning and fulfillment system.

• The IT service catalog is embedded in the CMP product, so the functionality is narrowly focused on requesting and provisioning cloud services only

• If the CMP catalog is not integrated with other general-purpose service catalogs, then users can only subscribe to and provision for cloud services

Standalone IT service catalogs

This top-down approach to building IT service catalogs puts the user first, and the catalog itself is the primary focus of the product. This approach:

• Separates the service catalog from back-end fulfillment processes

• Maintains a consistent user experience across all IT services

• Eliminates the need to retrain users if the underlying fulfillment system changes

• Integrates with diverse fulfillment systems on the back end, to ensure that users can order a broad range of services—for example, both cloud and traditional ITSM services

Figure 1. A bottom-up approach to building IT service catalogs optimized for ITSM systems

Figure 2. A bottom-up approach to building IT service catalog optimized for cloud services provisioning and automation

Figure 3. Top-down approach to building IT portal and catalog, which is primarily focused on the user experience

Portal and catalog

Business users

KM

ITIL Processes

Incident

Change

Request

Portal and catalog

Business users

Cloud provisioning automation

ManagedPrivate Public

Portal and catalog

Business users

IT management orchestration

ITSM ITSM Cloud Cloud Other

Business white paper | One click away from IT services

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Requirements for the modern IT service catalog

What is required of an IT service catalog?

• A superior user experience. A catalog starts with the user experience, and needs to be designed with user experience first in mind. Today, users are accustomed to shopping experiences from iTunes, Amazon, EBay and the like—often using their mobile devices. Non-stop consumption, quick and easy self-service are critical for winning their hearts and minds. With a service catalog, IT can provide the same type of self-service—allowing users to order services with a few clicks anytime and from anywhere.

• A single catalog. It is a reality that most IT organizations have multiple user-facing service catalogs. In many cases, catalogs for the standard ITSM services and catalogs for provisioning of private and hybrid cloud services are not integrated. IT organizations may offer their business users separate catalogs for ordering and provisioning hardware and devices, software, and cloud services. These are again separated from catalogs for user onboarding or ordering productivity services, such as communication, collaboration, data, connectivity, or support services. To provide a superior user experience a catalog needs to aggregate these multiple catalogs, providing a single point for ordering and consuming services that meets 100 percent of users’ needs.

• Integration and automation for a consistent delivery experience. What is true for the front end is true for service delivery. Automated workflow orchestration is the key to an overall, unified, and consistent delivery experience—integrating the catalog with multiple fulfillment systems across different suppliers. This way, a single service request is automatically routed to the right back-end systems for automatic fulfillment. For the IT staff, it is important to have easy-to-use administration and maintenance capabilities with so-called codeless configuration, so that IT can rather focus on fulfillment workflows than on programming. The result is fast, repeatable, and transparent service delivery.

Figure 4. A single, aggregated catalog resides on a single IT self-service portal

IT Service Tools

Notifications

Subscriptions Expiring Soon

My Subscriptions

Travel Local Weather IT News Chat with Support Assistance

Quick Links Knowledge Library My Support TicketsCreate Generic SupportTicket Request

Employee Incentive Programs and Benefits Portal

Organization News Service Catalog New Services Featured Services Popular Services

More Tools

San Francisco,California

68°

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Why service aggregation and not consolidation?

A single IT service catalog can be a consolidated catalog, which replaces existing catalogs by moving and consolidating them. But, although consolidation of one catalog to a new catalog illustrates the value of the new catalog’s capabilities, consolidation of a second and third catalog becomes a large project.

The length of the project continues to expand as more catalogs are added. Moreover, consolidating IT service catalogs assumes that the existing catalogs are detached from their fulfillment systems, which are typically then discarded. Besides the unwieldy size and the scope of these projects—which can often become multi-year projects—you then have to integrate the consolidated IT service catalog with the multiple fulfillment systems. In many cases, IT will try to consolidate the fulfillment systems as well. This is at best a very complex undertaking, and at worst a sheer waste of time and resources.

In cases when IT is trying to broker public cloud services—where IT doesn’t own the services—moving and consolidating service catalogs into one is not viable. IT as a service broker has multiple service suppliers and external systems that most likely change frequently, depending on price or quality, but implementing changes now has to be swift and not take months like in the past.

An aggregated IT service catalog, on the other hand, aggregates services—including the validations, options, and access policies—from the underlying service catalogs. This standalone a catalog of catalogs integrates with existing fulfillment systems in the IT back office. Once you have your aggregated catalog, you can bundle composite services for even greater user choice and convenience, and eventually, rationalize those services that overlap or are duplicates of others. None of the existing systems need replacement, and you can start achieving the ROI from day 1.

Figure 5. Aggregating all catalogs to a new service catalog and using the existing fulfillment systems, organizations get instant value

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Figure 6. An aggregated catalog allows IT to create new bundles, which consist of services from different catalogs that are fulfilled by multiple IT suppliers

Composite service bundling

When different services from different catalogs and catalog types are aggregated under a single catalog, then IT can begin bundling services together to offer an even better experience. Services packaged in these bundles are more convenient to order than ordering each service separately. For example, a manager can order a new-hire bundle with a few clicks.

This service bundle could consist of a company email account; PC hardware or virtual desktop; smart phone; office phone and voicemail; an authentication device for the PC or virtual desktop; a remote-access service; and a PC common operating environment. To follow this example, on the first day on the job, the new hire can order the following services and gears in a single click: PC or virtual desktop encryption, instant messaging account, printing privileges, a digital identification badge, and a backup solution.

Smart routing of service requests from the catalog to underlying fulfillment systems

To make the single, aggregated catalog actionable, it needs to integrate with fulfillment systems. These fulfillment systems can be on premise or in a private cloud in your data center; they can be on the premises of your managed services provider (MSP), or in a public cloud.

Trying to integrate the aggregated catalog with back-end systems in a point-to-point fashion is not optimal: you may have too many integration points to implement and maintain; the approach is not agile and scalable; and you may be required to rework the integrations, if the integration points are upgraded. You need a new, unifying integration platform, which is lightweight and enables you to integrate all your services—whether on-premise or in the cloud, external or internal—in a plug-and-play fashion.

Portal and catalogBusiness consumers Integrations Source systems

System 4Catalog 4

System 1Catalog 1

System 2Catalog 2

System 3Catalog 3

Benefits of a single, engaging catalog

• Improves user satisfaction—All services are available to business users in a single, unified catalog that allows them to self-service order and provision the desired services.

• Delivers all services through the consistent, single experience—A single catalog resides on the IT portal and is a part of the consistent IT portal experience. Since all services are aggregated in one place, the experience of ordering any type of service is simplified.

• Maximizes ROI—The aggregated catalog does not replace any existing systems or catalogs and does not require any transformation of IT projects. Existing catalogs can be aggregated in a matter of minutes.

• Enables IT to provide more new services—Bundling services from different types of catalogs provides users with new service offerings, which are convenient and quick to order and consume.

• Eliminates the need for user training and re-training—Standalone service catalogs are consumer-centric and intuitive to use and navigate. If IT replaces the back-end fulfillment systems, users can continue using the standalone catalog without disruption.

Business white paper | One click away from IT services

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About HP Propel

HP Propel product delivers a standalone enterprise IT portal and service catalog to support IT as a service broker. It offers a familiar Internet-style shopping experience across multiple IT services, whether on premise or in the cloud.

The HP Propel service catalog aggregates the services from multiple catalogs—for example, from ITSM and cloud-provisioning catalogs—and can be integrated with any back-end system. HP Propel orchestrates and manages the entire service lifecycle, acting as a broker for multiple suppliers.

HP Propel catalog includes ubiquitous filtering and search capabilities for users to rapidly find the services they want. The dynamic forms simplify the ordering process and make the catalog extremely intuitive to use.

Users can order services for themselves or on behalf of someone else. For non-pre–approved services, the approval process is straightforward: the approver has multiple ways to approve or deny the request for a service:

• Through the HP Propel portal

• Through the back-end fulfillment system (for example, ITSM or the cloud provider system)

• Through email

Figure 7. The integration platform enables point-to-multipoint integrations between a single catalog and multiple fulfillment systems

Private cloud

Managed cloud

Public cloud

Traditional

Service exchange

Orchestration

Message broker

Adapter

IT service portal and catalog

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Figure 8. HP Propel service catalog: the users’ view

HP Propel also provides the native catalog in which the IT personnel can define services directly. This native catalog is also aggregated to the HP Propel catalog, so that the users only access a single catalog at a time. Fulfillment of requests is seamlessly orchestrated through the HP Propel integration platform, and the requests are routed to the corresponding fulfillment system(s). The service aggregation is done in real time. The solution also delivers a software development kit (SDK) for easy customization of existing integrations and for the development of the new integration connectors by third parties.

HP Propel works in any environment you currently have and enables you to provide your business users with the single front-end.

Key takeaways

Today’s users are demanding. They want the whole world and they want it now. If IT can’t satisfy those demands, users swiftly go elsewhere. But this increases risk for the organization by exposing sensitive data, weakening security and governance, and preventing visibility into the organization’s actual vs. official IT infrastructure. By seizing this moment, IT can reduce these risks by transforming itself into an IT service broker.

A critical aspect of being a service broker is for IT to make use of a single service catalog, which aggregates and unifies multiple services and catalogs under one self-service mechanism.

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The ideal catalog can:

• Aggregate rather than consolidate IT services and catalogs

• Act as a standalone module, decoupled from back-end functionality

• Provide an engaging consumer experience for end users

• Integrate with fulfillment systems to deliver services at superior speed and agility

• Allow users to order services from any mobile device or from their desktops

The implementation of a single, aggregated, and actionable catalog is a key step toward transforming your IT organization into a service-oriented multi-supplier environment—a true service broker.

Learn more athp.com/go/propel

© Copyright 2015 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

ITIL® is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.

4AA5-7832ENW, April 2015

Business white paper | One click away from IT services