Overview
The service catalog is a foundational artifact for ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 certification. It provides a complete, structured inventory of every service the organization delivers or consumes — with owners, customers, criticality ratings, SLA references, and dependency mappings. The catalog feeds into service level management (Clause 6.1), business relationship management (Clause 7.1), and capacity planning (Clause 6.5).
A well-structured service catalog makes the rest of the SMS concrete. Instead of abstract process definitions, each SMS process can reference specific services: SLAs attach to named services, incident categories map to catalog entries, and change management assesses impact against documented service dependencies. The skill reads your organization profile and SMS scope to ensure the catalog is consistent with what has already been defined.
For a step-by-step walkthrough, see the ISO 20000 SMS workspace tutorial .
What It Covers
- Business services — customer-facing services that deliver direct value to clients or end users
- Supporting services — infrastructure, platform, and internal services that underpin business services
- Third-party services — services procured from external suppliers
- Service details — owner, customers, criticality, availability requirements, and support hours for each entry
- Dependency mapping — which supporting services underpin which business services, with single-point-of-failure identification
Example Conversation
You: We need to build the service catalog for our ISO 20000 certification. The organization profile and SMS scope are already in place.
Agent: I’ve loaded your organization profile and SMS scope. Your scope includes three business services (Managed Hosting, Network Management, Service Desk) and three supporting services (Monitoring Platform, Backup Service, DNS Management). Let me capture the details for each one.
Starting with Managed Hosting — who owns this service?
You: Priya Patel, our Infrastructure Lead.
Agent: What are the availability and support requirements?
You: 99.9% uptime target, 24x7 support with a 15-minute response time for P1 incidents. It’s our most critical service — all our major clients depend on it.
Agent: I’ll mark it as Critical criticality. Who are the customers?
You: NorthBank plc, Greenfield Healthcare, and Metro Logistics — all external clients. We also host some internal systems on the same platform.
Agent: Good, I’ll list both the external clients and internal IT as customers. Now let me work through the remaining services. For Network Management — same owner?
You: No, that’s David Liu, Network Engineering Lead. 99.5% availability target, business hours support with on-call for P1/P2. Customers are the same three clients. It depends on the monitoring platform.
Agent: And the Service Desk?
You: Mike Torres, Service Desk Manager. Business hours with extended hours for NorthBank. It’s the entry point for all incident and service requests, so it depends on Jira Service Management as the ITSM tool and the monitoring platform for alert routing.
Agent: Now for the supporting services. The Monitoring Platform (Nagios) — who owns it?
You: David Liu as well. It’s internal-only, high criticality since all alerting depends on it. 99.9% availability, 24x7.
Agent: I’ve captured all six services. Let me map the dependencies and run the
service_catalog_validator…Result: PASS. 6 services validated — 3 business, 3 supporting. No duplicate IDs. No orphan dependencies. All business services have at least one customer. One observation: the Monitoring Platform is a dependency for 3 other services with no redundancy documented — consider noting this as a single point of failure.
You: Good catch. We’re planning to migrate to Datadog for redundancy. Note that in the catalog for now.
Agent: Updated. The service catalog JSON and formatted document are saved and ready for the gap assessment and service management plan skills.
Sample Output Excerpt
The skill produces both a formatted markdown document and a structured JSON file. Here is a representative excerpt from the JSON.
{
"services": [
{
"id": "SVC-001",
"name": "Managed Hosting",
"description": "Server and infrastructure hosting for external clients and internal systems",
"type": "business",
"service_owner": "Priya Patel, Infrastructure Lead",
"customers": ["NorthBank plc", "Greenfield Healthcare", "Metro Logistics", "Internal IT"],
"criticality": "critical",
"availability_requirements": "99.9%",
"support_hours": "24x7, 15-min P1 response",
"dependencies": ["SVC-004", "SVC-005", "SVC-006"]
},
{
"id": "SVC-004",
"name": "Monitoring Platform",
"description": "Nagios-based infrastructure and service monitoring",
"type": "supporting",
"service_owner": "David Liu, Network Engineering Lead",
"customers": ["Internal — Infrastructure Operations, Network Engineering, Service Desk"],
"criticality": "high",
"availability_requirements": "99.9%",
"support_hours": "24x7",
"dependencies": [],
"notes": "Single point of failure for alerting. Migration to Datadog planned for redundancy."
},
{
"id": "SVC-007",
"name": "AWS Cloud Hosting",
"description": "IaaS for client workloads managed by the hosting team",
"type": "third_party",
"service_owner": "Priya Patel, Infrastructure Lead",
"customers": ["Internal — Managed Hosting team"],
"criticality": "high",
"availability_requirements": "Per AWS SLA (99.99%)",
"support_hours": "24x7 via AWS Support",
"dependencies": []
}
]
}
Extension Tools
service_catalog_validator
Validates the service catalog JSON for completeness and consistency:
| Check | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Required fields | Every service must have id, name, service_owner, type, and customers |
| Duplicate IDs | Flags any services sharing the same identifier |
| Orphan dependencies | Flags dependency references that point to non-existent service IDs |
| Business service customers | Business-type services must have at least one customer listed |
| Minimum entries | At least one service must be present in the catalog |
The validator also rejects placeholder values like “TBD” or “N/A” in required fields, ensuring the catalog contains real service data ready for auditor review.
Getting Started
Run the ISO 20000 Organization Profile and ISO 20000 SMS Scope Definition skills first — the service catalog reads both to ensure consistency with your defined scope and organizational context. Then activate ISO 20000 Service Catalog and the agent will guide you through capturing each service.
Have this information ready:
- A list of all customer-facing and internal IT services you deliver
- Service owners (the person accountable for each service)
- Customers or consumers of each service
- Availability targets and support hours
- Which supporting services underpin which business services
The completed catalog is referenced by the gap assessment and service management plan, and provides the concrete service inventory that SLAs, incident categories, and change impact assessments attach to.