What is a service catalog?

From the point of view of the IT organization, the situation is further aggravated by the fact that employees are still supplying themselves with services bypassing the IT offering. While a few years ago perhaps only the printer from the media market came under the heading of shadow IT, today cloud offerings that bypass corporate IT and are thus also used outside of governance represent a much more comprehensive problem. If you want to go down the path of regularly adapting your own portfolio to what the market has to offer and reacting quickly to requirements in the company, then a service catalog must be flexible, adaptable and accepted by the user. It is the central entry point through which a user can obtain information about the IT organization’s complete range of services at any time.

When people talk about service catalogs today, they often do so against the backdrop of ongoing or completed standardization. However, this can also mean standardizing only the individual services, while at the same time individualizing the overall range of services for employees. In the context of staff retention, it can make sense for different employees to be able to choose the service that best suits them from a selection of similar services. From different display sizes for notebooks to different cell phones and individual software, this can quickly result in a wide range of different services.