Service catalog

A service catalog, per someone’s lovingly curated original research on Wikipedia, is

“..a means of centralizing all services that are important to the stakeholders of the enterprises which implement and use it. Given its digital and virtual implementation, via software, the service catalog acts, at a minimum, as a digital registry and a means for highly distributed enterprises to see, find, invoke, and execute services regardless of where they exist in the world. This means that people in one part of the world can find and utilize the same services that people in other parts of the world use, eliminating the need to develop and support local services via a federated implementation model.

“Centralizing services also acts as a means of identifying service gaps and redundancies that can then be addressed by the enterprise to improve itself”

The point at which a service catalog becomes irresistible is the tipping point where your organisation has so large and sprawling that the potential economies of scale outweigh the costs of disenfranchising all your local subject matter experts by jamming them into a universal model that won’t quite fit any of their local day to day experiences, and depriving them of the autonomy to use their subject matter expertise to make pragmatic decisions on the hoof to keep the orgainsation moving.

This is part of a wider thrust to operationalise the organisation. You cannot fight it because you are the redundancy the thrust is designed to eradicate.

See also

• Playbook
• Service line
• Operationalisation
• Outsourcing