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Using Service Catalog for Complex Corporate Business Processes

By Gary_Eisenhuth posted Feb 27, 2017 02:43 PM

  

One of the more complex and important business processes for most organizations is employee on-boarding. Organizing and accounting for all the tools and assets new employees need is an important step in making new hires comfortable and productive. Proper execution of the process leads to satisfied new hires and huge cost savings for your organization.

Many of my customers tell me they want to use CA Service Catalog to help with on-boarding, whether it’s for permanent new hires, part-time consultants to be on-boarded for a defined period of time, new students at a university or interns starting out at a medical facility.

A well-defined service catalog, which includes all services required by a business to run day-to-day operations, can help with on-boarding. The catalog provides a consistent method for employees to select and receive the services they need to perform daily operations.

While each organization has its own requirements and processes for bringing new people into their organization, all well-defined service catalogs share some foundational requirements. Your first priority is to define and build simple services before tackling more complex services. However, your team should define requirements for more complex services from the outset, even if they will be phased in after the foundational services are built.

Seven key requirements for efficient on-boarding are:

  • Provide new hires with the necessary resources and tools from day 1.
  • Ensure that dependencies between services are taken into account so that provisioning takes place in the proper order. For example, employees need a corporate network account before they can request/receive access to business applications.
  • Establish logical and efficient approval cycles that comply with corporate guidelines.
  • Include activities not related to IT, such as new hire training, office space requests, badge access to employee-appropriate facilities, corporate credit cards and business cards.  
  • Leverage base service catalog foundation services (ordering a new laptop, requesting mobile devices) as part of a bundled on-boarding process.
  • Institute well-defined SLAs and escalation processes for services not fulfilled within a specified time period.
  • To take your organization higher on the maturity ladder, you would expand the deployment using process automation tools to integrate CA Service Catalog with HR and security systems, thus streamlining these processes and making them repeatable and consistent.

In a future blog I’ll discuss issues to consider when planning an initial service catalog implementation of a Service Catalog.

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