Service catalog: Difference between revisions
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'''A [[service catalog]], that is to say, is the [[jobsworth's charter]].''' | '''A [[service catalog]], that is to say, is the [[jobsworth's charter]].''' | ||
It is hard to fault his logic. All my services cost something, and must be [[shredding|allocated]] back to a cost centre. The starting assumption must be that all valuable services have been catalogued and assigned to one function or another. | It is hard to fault his logic. All my services cost something, and must be [[shredding|allocated]] back to a cost centre. The starting assumption must be that all valuable services have been catalogued and assigned to one function or another. One should ''not'' carry out an uncatalogued service: it is either ([[Q.E.D.]]) unnecessary and unshreddible, or it ''is'' shreddible, but only because it is in someone else's catalog and therefore it is their problem, not mine. By all lights, going “off catalog” is wasteful at best and liable to trigger turf-warfare between risk controllers, all of which is meat and drink to the censorious wagging fingers if [[internal audit]] when they come to visit. Self-inflicted wounds, all. | ||
The point at which a [[service catalog]] becomes irresistible is the [[tipping point]] where your organisation has become so sprawling that the potential [[redundancy|economies of scale]] outweigh the costs of disenfranchising all your local [[subject matter expert]]s by jamming them into a universal model that won’t ''quite'' fit ''any'' of their 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 organisation moving. | The point at which a [[service catalog]] becomes irresistible is the [[tipping point]] where your organisation has become so sprawling that the potential [[redundancy|economies of scale]] outweigh the costs of disenfranchising all your local [[subject matter expert]]s by jamming them into a universal model that won’t ''quite'' fit ''any'' of their 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 organisation moving. | ||
Revision as of 21:51, 31 August 2019
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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[1]”
In other words, you write down everything each machine, system, application or employee[2] is meant to do. It is a way of atomising, articulating and mapping every function in the organisation, with a view to operationalising every role.
This exercise will do two things: (1) excite the management layer who will regard it some kind of master key that unlocks all unrealised “efficiencies”, and (2) licence those at the coalface who are so disposed, on loyal grounds of preserving the integrity of the control environment, to decline any invitation to take action or responsibility not explicitly assigned to them in the catalog.
A service catalog, that is to say, is the jobsworth's charter.
It is hard to fault his logic. All my services cost something, and must be allocated back to a cost centre. The starting assumption must be that all valuable services have been catalogued and assigned to one function or another. One should not carry out an uncatalogued service: it is either (Q.E.D.) unnecessary and unshreddible, or it is shreddible, but only because it is in someone else's catalog and therefore it is their problem, not mine. By all lights, going “off catalog” is wasteful at best and liable to trigger turf-warfare between risk controllers, all of which is meat and drink to the censorious wagging fingers if internal audit when they come to visit. Self-inflicted wounds, all.
The point at which a service catalog becomes irresistible is the tipping point where your organisation has become so 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 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 organisation moving.
This is part of a wider thrust to operationalise the organisation and eliminate - by which I mean make redundancies. You, dear subject matter expert, cannot fight it, because you are the redundancy the thrust is designed to eradicate.
Come the apocalypse
The service catalog is also of a piece with the risk taxonomy in its conviction that the forward needs of the organisation are perfectly understood, anticipated, and pre-determined. There is nothing new under the sun. Unless we are on the brink of apocalypse - the apocalypse that is: the one with horsemen, not just any old calamity - logically, this view is wildly mistaken. As the JC never tires of reminding us, Risks, challenges and opportunities present themselves from undetected crevices in the space-time continuum. They are not languishing in plain sight within the pages of your playbook.
It is at just the moment when existential threats emerge, unbidden, from the poorly-sewn seams of your risk taxonomy, that you don't want your risk controllers going "sorry, but according to the service catalog, that's not my problem".
Machines, not meatware
As that earnest collaboration on Wikipedia quoted above notes, the idea of a service catalog originated in the software management. In any decent sized organisation, pitches for new software will come in from all sides, and carefully curating the the IT "estate" is profoundly important.
But software is dumb. It follows rules. It can only do what it was bought to do. To augment or change the application to which your software is dedicated, to meet a new challenge or opportunity - that requires judgment. An executive decision. Only a person can make an executive decision.[3]
Though at times it might not seem like it, your human employees are not dumb animals. Tethering them to a service catalog, of course, might make them feel that way. But you have employees precisely because they can make judgements, and take executive decisions, and do imaginative stuff you weren't expecting them to when a tricky situation calls for it. Software cannot do this. Not even Deep Mind.
This is the profound difference between humans and machines. In the hive mind's evangelical fervor for AI, this distinction has been lost. We overlook it at our peril. Humans catch the bits that the service catalog didn't anticipate.
Lawyers. A special case.
If there is one category of employees which is uniquely unsuitable for a service catalogue it is the legal department. It is a misconception that the legal department is there to answer and a pine on all legal questions. In fact, the legal department is there to apply non novel legal questions only 4. Established law, inside normal science, on the tilled and and tended fields of existing practice, is something that the business people and operations staff must understand themselves.
No one is ignorant of the law. Only where you do not know the law should you ask the legal department.
That is, the legal department is there precisely to answer the questions that the organisation was not expecting to to be asked. These are by definition the questions that do not not match the carved joints of the risk taxonomy or service catalogue bracket unless your legal service catalogue is stated as broadly as to answer all the questions the organisation was not expecting to be asked.