Last updated: December 1, 2021
In the next step of your documentation project, let’s have a look at how clearly your IT landscape is currently structured. If you are not sure which systems are employed for which purpose and which services the IT department provides, you will find it difficult to accomplish this task at the moment. It also depends on the objective of your documentation project. If you mean to create an all-system oriented documentation, you will not need any service catalogue. However, when you start the second cycle of your documentation project, at the latest, this task should be attempted with the goal to define functional arrangements for your IT landscape. This will make your life easier in the future. Otherwise, leverage the insight gained in the first cycle of your inventory scan to get a better understanding of your network and its interrelations.
Think of how to bundle the existing hardware and software as well as the processes and services into functional arrangements. These arrangements are the IT services you provide for your customers, no matter if these are internal or external customers, and regardless if you are working in an internal IT department or are an external service provider. If you have not done so already, define individual groups or arrangements that have a functional relation and thus provide clarity and a clear assignment. At this point, I would like to point out to the blog post named “Add a Structure to Your IT Landscape”. It contains detailed information on this topic.
The model: a service catalogue according to ITIL V3
After all, this procedure is all about creating a so-called service catalogue. In a service catalogue, all your IT systems are assigned to so-called infrastructure services and described in greatest detail. And this is where your arrangements come in. They document the technical and functional interrelations of your IT systems by means of so-called IT relations. The Docusnap documentation suite will be your ideal partner when it comes to keep the inventory data that are required to document these relations up-to-date.
However, if your documentation project is currently only about creating an initial documentation, you can catch up later in a second step where you organise your documentation. If you intend to create just a system-oriented IT documentation, you will not need a service catalogue. So you can skip this step. For a process-oriented documentation of your IT landscape, however, you will need these arrangements. Give it a try: the structure of your network will be clearer, and you will provide a better understanding of how your IT landscape works.
We will not go into further details on how to create a service catalogue here, as this would go beyond the scope of this article. Our blog post titled Building Your Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio“ (Blogbeitrag vom Montag) provides further insight into this topic. There, we supply details on how to create your own service catalogue most efficiently.