Pat: We’re doing a service catalog.
Kelly: So are we. How many services are you going to have in yours, do you think?
Pat: About twenty.
Kelly: We’re past five hundred and counting!
Pat: Seems high.
Kelly: I know you have more than twenty; just the other day you said you were managing forty-five different service level agreements.
Pat: Oh, those are mostly our applications.
Kelly: Aren’t those in your service catalog?
Pat: No, of course not. Are they in yours?
Kelly: Yes, of course. They are the major things we’re managing for the business. How can they not be in your service catalog? Service level agreement, service catalog – same thing, right?
Pat: We have something called a hosting service, that covers all our applications. Each application is an instance of that hosting service. We manage the hosting services as a different portfolio, but we don’t call that our service catalog.
Kelly: I don’t see how that can work. We “host” two enormous mainframe applications that are worlds unto themselves, a bunch of midrange stuff, and then dozens and dozens of smaller scale Web apps. I could see the Web apps being instances of a generic hosting service, but what about the bigger stuff?
Pat: Well, as you know we don’t have anything quite as huge as yours – lots of medium sized stuff. We did define several tiers of hosting, based on capacity and availability requirements. What if you took your two biggest applications and kept them as separate service catalog entries, and saw the rest as simply hosting instances? Are the rest of the applications generally comparable?
Kelly: Maybe… I’ll have to think about that.
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Anyone else have any thoughts?
