Service Portfolio and Service Catalog: Zombie Killers

I smell your abandoned Sharepoint site from here...

I read on CA on Service Management blog a funny post by Dave Wilt remarking how important is continuous Service Catalog and Service Portfolio management, and the need to keep them up to date to avoid what Dave Wilt calls “zombies” in our organizations: those IT assets or CIs no longer needed that wander around our datacenters. According to Dave’s definition of “zombie” in an organization:

Where are the zombies in your enterprise?  How about virtual machines that were quickly and easily spun up but are no longer needed or used?  SharePoint sites?  File shares, intranet pages, user desktop software?  User accounts? How about entire business or IT services?

Dave Wilt thinks of Service Catalog as a weapon to fight zombies, with a closed-loop approach on provisioning using a Service Catalog. One of the points he insists the most is “cost transparency”, that means: whether or not a formal chargeback model for IT services provisioning exists, users that request a service (and their managers) must be informed of the cost of delivering that service through time. It might be tough for some IT shops who are just starting to deal with their very first Service Catalog to think of setting up Financial Management, but I believe that, unlike IT jargon, money is a universal language that everyone in the company will understand.

Nobody wants to be expensive; nobody wants their department to top the Big Spenders list at their organization; so let them know how much a new virtual machine costs when someone asks you to spun up “3 or 4“. I don’t mean you should use bills to frighten away the beggars, but you must collaborate on making them become conscious about what they are asking and maybe rethink if they really need that many and that big.

It’s quite interesting to read the full post, just in case you need one more reason to be convinced that Service Catalog is the cornerstone of healthy IT Service Management.

You can read it here.