In the first part of this article, I outlined the criteria for defining system groups. Now, we are going to start documenting these groups.
Documenting the assignments
You can create the defined IT services directly in the wizard that opens when you select Management / Inventory / System Groups. However, this is quite tedious as you have to indicate a company and a domain for each system group. A more straightforward way is to create all system groups in a first step from within the Data Explorer. To do so, select the desired company and domain. The tree structure displays the “System Groups” menu item. Select it and then click “New” to create all your system groups one by one. You only have to enter a name and click “Save”.
In a last step, select Management / Inventory / System Groups to launch the above-mentioned “Manage System Groups“ wizard and assign the IT systems (assets) to your system groups. Once you are done, the assets are displayed below the system groups they have been assigned to. This means that you can also create separate manuals for each system group later, thereby making your IT landscape more transparent.
Orderly and effective documentation
Now, you have subdivided your IT landscape into “finely chopped bits”. At first sight, this process of subdividing your IT landscape appears to be quite tedious – and, indeed, it is. However, some areas will benefit from this approach which facilitates many a task. For example, IT budget controlling becomes easier as more granular evaluations or planning for a specific service are possible. You will also be more at ease when documenting your change management. A good deal of discipline is required to always maintain these service numbers in daily business, but it is worth the effort.
When creating system groups, I always coped by first defining the characteristics which make up a group (an IT service). The following points have always been crucial for me – of course, depending from the company size and the complexity of the IT landscape:
– Employed hardware and software are clearly distinguishable by function. In order to assess this, you need the corresponding IT knowledge. Break free from physical hardware and software correlations, as software may belong to a different service than the hardware on which it is installed. Try and think in terms of processes and topics.
– If you can see that some items belong to the same topic, you can make up a separate IT service for them, but avoid turning each minor issue into a major topic that would justify the creation of a separate service. Try to find the golden mean because too many services will complicate your workflows. Unfortunately, this is also true for the opposite.
It is quite normal that no two IT managers will make the same classification, as there is no generally accepted rule, even though many IT services, such as e-mail, are found in every network. Use one version of your classification as a first draft. You will probably find later that this first classification was still far from perfect, but this is also absolutely normal. Just adjust your service catalogue accordingly. After all, your aim is to improve and refine it in the course of time. Continuous enhancement is the magic word, so put it into practice! Only its application in daily practice will prove whether the classification of your IT systems is fit for purpose.
Deriving your service portfolio from the service catalogue
You can then use your service catalogue to provide a service portfolio to your customers or users. This, in turn, involves combining the individual services and bundling them into business services. Your users will not care about what hardware and software is employed exactly, but they want to know how IT can provide the best possible support for their daily work. For this purpose, IT services have to be defined. However, since the service catalogue is a purely technical documentation, you still require a document that describes use scenarios for customers. According to ITIL V3, this document is called a service portfolio. If you want to create a service portfolio, the corresponding structures should already exist.
The natural order of things, however, would of course be the other way round: You would first think about what the customer needs and describe it in the service portfolio before purchasing the hardware and software which can then be documented in the service catalogue. In general, this is perfectly right, but it does not apply to the initial creation process, unless there is no IT in operation yet and you are really starting from scratch. For future, new service definitions, you will proceed in the “correct” order and focus on the customer.
For more details on this topic, see the separate blog post that deals with the creation of a service catalogue and a service portfolio.
In the Docusnap documentation tool, you can map and document your service catalogue and service portfolio by using the IT Concepts module. Docusnap provides a dedicated text editor for this purpose and thus acts as a one-stop-shop for your entire IT documentation. Please note that the service catalogue is an internal document intended for the IT department. If it is used to its full extent, it also holds the passwords for all IT systems in use. This means that you need to restrict the access to this documentation accordingly. Thanks to the integrated user management feature, Docusnap is able to perfectly meet this requirement.
