What is an Internal Service Offering
This article is part of a series explaining the concept of a service catalog.
To have a catalog of something, we first need to rewind to the basics of service design. A service is a type of work that is performed for others. Services can be intangible, meaning they cannot be touched or held, like consulting or HR advice. Services can also be tangible, meaning they involve a physical product or activity, like purchasing a software license or booking a travel. Some services, like automation, are not provided by humans, and for example, an application service represents a deployed software stack.
A service offering is a specific product or package of services that a team or organization provides to its customers or employees. Service offering is designed to meet the needs of a specific group of people to solve a particular problem they are facing and consists of a commitment that uniquely defines the level of service in terms of scope, availability, pricing, or packaging options. Customers can choose various levels of performance and features for a given service through service offerings, typically made available as distinct items in the service catalog. A service can have multiple service offerings, and each made available as separate catalog items with different service level agreements (SLAs).
The level of abstraction used in Enterprise IT applied to cloud and hybrid software tech stacks is so metaphysical, that to illustrate the concept to stakeholders from broader functions like Finance, Workplace, HR, or Publishing, I use two distinct examples to illustrate company’s internal service offering.
Scenario 1 — Organizing an in-person workshop
A group of employees needs to work towards the same goal and reach a consensus during an in-person workshop on company premises. For this purpose, several internal departments are providing services to fulfill this goal. A employee who leads the workshop organization starts the preparation by requesting offered services that match the team’s goal.
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In this example, the Office Reception service clearly offers more to firm employees than just visitor registration or catering. It is not just a generic contact point but a professional services team. For a workshop event, they set a high-quality standard for visitor registration that consists of many steps behind-the-scenes like car parking navigation, badge provisioning, or an office tour — all part of a transparent and predictable service offering. For a different context, Office Reception might provide a different service offering, say, to schedule a postal package pick-up or call transfer. The list of all service offerings that Office Reception service provides to its customers forms their service catalog.
Scenario 2 — Data Scientist Onboarding
A new Data Scientist just joined an internal Enterprise IT team, and she needs to get up to speed. To start productive work, she needs to get access to various tools and connected repositories.
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Snowflake represents a different type of service than the first example, it is an application service. Similarly to services offered by teams of humans, application services have different service offerings. Snowflake is a powerful software with a range of data integration and data science services. A key service offering that the application team decided to package is requesting access to a pre-defined list of schemas to ease the onboarding of a new employee who needs to work with the tool.
It might be now apparent why it is an issue if service offerings from any of these two scenarios are documented in various tools, portals, or knowledge bases, worst case, not documented at all. This prevents employees from achieving their goals, and the key tool to address this is called internal service catalog.
