Does your organization have a service catalog in place, but struggle with low customer satisfaction or lack of user adoption? Is your organization hearing from customers, "I requested something from IT, but it has never been delivered and I don't know who to contact." Is your organization missing a one stop shop for customers to order services? Too many times we walk into organizations that are facing these challenges, but they are unsure of why and how to address the problems.

What we have found is that these organizations seem to be suffering from what we call the "black hole syndrome". Perhaps a customer orders something from IT. They never receive that item or an update on the status. This causes a loss of faith in IT and the services that are being provided; IT (or possibly the Service Catalog if one exists) begins to be viewed as a black hole providing limited value to customers when they need it, thus giving them no incentive to use it or even worse look outside of IT for these services.

The problem here is a pretty simple one. In the past, IT had been handled internally, and did not require the customer to have the ability to easily identify services. With the inevitable modernization of IT, it is essential to align IT with the business in order to gain user adoption and create a successful customer service environment. In order for a service catalog to be successful, it needs to be user friendly, customer-focused, and provide services the customer can both understand and easily select in business terms. Help your users shop for services like you shop online. Build request fulfillment processes that are easy to manage and provide visability to requests throughout their order to delivery lifecycle.

On Thursday, March 27th join Jason Rosenfeld and Rich Pilgrim of Cask and Mercedes Alvarez of CSU East Bay to learn "How to Build a Successful Service Catalog." A few of the key points they will elaborate on include:

• Developing afoundationalservice portfolio
• Aligning IT services with business strategy and customer needs
• Rationalizing services to focus on user demands
• Defining and mapping services and owners
• Designing a user interface that is easy to use
• Building a requestfulfillmentprocess

By aligning with the business before implementing your service catalog, you too can escape the "twilight zone" and make IT a valuable contribution to your organization...