By bringing more focus to the lifecycle of services - from their initial definition and design to the ongoing delivery and support - version 3 of ITIL® emphasizes a critical success factor in your ongoing roadmap of IT Service Management (ITSM) improvement: integrate with your business customers by defining what services you should be offering to them, and how to deliver and support them cost-effectively.

In other words, in line with the teachings of ITIL's version 3 Strategy book, as an IT organization, you will be more likely to earn yourself a seat at the organization’s strategic table if you first define who your customers are and what you should be providing to your customers (your "services") in order to help them achieve their objectives. After that, improving your processes for how you support and deliver those IT services will be much more likely to deliver the results you desire due to the focus you’ll bring to the end result: the quality of the services you deliver to your customers. You can tweak your Change Management process again and again, but if you aren’t focused on ensuring that these improvements result in better overall transitioning of new or changed services into operation, then you’ll miss an opportunity to truly improve both your standing in the eyes of your customers and the cost effectiveness of your operation.

This focus on beginning with the end in mind is what has sometimes been missing from the more tactical process improvement activities previously tried by the companies with whom we come in contact. They tell us that they have tried to improve a process here or there, but failed to realize the desired improvements in overall service delivery. The refresh of the ITIL literature helps to point these companies in the right direction, by emphasizing the lifecycle of:

• Service Strategy – Defining your “market”, and then defining and costing the Services that your customers need
• Service Design – Designing those services and establishing how they can be supported and delivered
• Service Transition – Building, testing, and deploying those services in a fashion that will ensure customer satisfaction
• Service Operation - Maintaining the quality of service in the production setting, and
• Continual Service Improvement – Driving improvement activities throughout the lifecycle, based upon the periodic reporting and analysis of the metrics generated by your IT Service Management framework.

Service Portfolio and the Service Catalog

With ITIL v3’s renewed emphasis on the service lifecycle, the recommended place to start your ITIL journey is to define your Service Portfolio. The Service Portfolio is an executive-level view for mapping services to business needs. It documents the services under development (a.k.a. Service Pipeline), services that are in production or available for deployment (a.k.a. Service Catalog), and the retired services. The Service Portfolio is useful for analyzing where to invest, prioritizing and allocating resources, risk management and financial modeling.

The Service Catalog is the published orderable subset of the Service Catalog, i.e. the live services. It contains information on deliverables, contact points, request procedures, terms and conditions, pricing, etc.
There are two aspects to the Service Catalog: the Business Service Catalog and the Technical Service Catalog.

The Business Service Catalog describes the relationship between the services the business processes that they support. A business process may be supported by more than one service; and, a service may support multiple business processes. For example, an ERP service may support the business processes of planning and logistics, procurement, accounting, budgeting, etc.

The Technical Service Catalog contains the relationships between the services and the supporting services, components and configuration items. The Technical Service

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