About Services and Service Catalogs

The Service Catalog is imperative to a service desk because it defines and communicates a list of Services that an organization provides to its employees or customers. Each Service in a catalog is defined by:

• Basic information: Name, description, status, stakeholders/owners, costs, etc.
• Service Categorization: The Service categorization has a three-tiered organization (Service, category, and subcategory) that determines the type of support required (Incident or Request), which Specifics form to display to capture the appropriate details, and which Priority Matrix to use.
• SLAs: A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an agreement between an entity (Customer, Service, or Configuration Item) and a Service Provider that defines Response/Resolve target times for a Service.
• Priority: The priority is used to establish timescales and effort to respond to and resolve an issue (Incident or Request). Priority is derived from an impact and urgency Priority Matrix.

To get your service desk started, CSM provides a thorough OOTB Service Catalog (found in the CSM Portal), shown in the following figure.

In CSM, a Service is a Major Business Object. The Service Form defines each Service. For more information about the Service Form, refer to the Service Form documentation.