Organizations choose an IT service desk solution for any number of reasons. Some of the most common include streamlined ticketing or incident management, change and release management, and the ability to track IT assets. One thing we find is that many new customers are surprised by how many parts of multi-step services they can automate through the service catalog. They might not have chosen an IT service management (ITSM) solution specifically to build workflows, but it often becomes the most important part of their service strategy. In addition, we’ve seen IT leaders bring the service catalog to other areas in the organization (like HR, facilities, and marketing) to create a single platform for employee service.
Here are five of our favorite IT service catalog descriptions from SolarWinds
® Service Desk (formerly Samanage) customers:
I started developing the employee onboarding process with other departments. The workflow management is just an amazing aspect of this system.”
- Gilad Vinitsky, Chief Technology Officer
The BLOC didn’t stop with onboarding. They’ve also built workflows for financial services such as purchase approvals or submitting mobile expenses. This has reduced the number of different communication platforms they’re using and broken down barriers between departments.
“It’s a very streamlined process where they attach two things, they fill out a quick form, and it goes through an approval process,” Vinitsky says. “Samanage is acting as a multiple solution platform for us. We’ve gone from six different platforms to one.”
We realized we can set it up where one employee works within the same system for all of their needs.”
- Bob Gardner, Manager of PMO and IT
Gardner took over in his current role and noticed that the marketing department was using the service catalog for requests. He recognized that he could do the same for IT, and took a leadership role in helping the entire organization build workflows.
“I met with all the different business owners and representatives of each of our teams at ACHC, and gave them a vision,” Gardner says. “We all kept talking, and all of a sudden, we’re planning onboarding and offboarding in HR, facilities and maintenance services, and internal support.”
The turnaround for onboarding and training through Samanage is now 10 days, which is a major improvement.
“A month would have been typical in the past,” Gardner says. “It was all communicated by Outlook. It might have been 40 emails on the chain, and it would get stuck if anyone was in a meeting or out of the office.”
We were able to take a four-email process and cut it in half. Our market managers love that feature.”
-David Palmer, Network Systems Engineer
Snap Kitchen uses the service catalog both for internal services, but also for some frequent customer interactions. Their loyalty program allows customers to earn points, but sometimes those points need an approval.
“You’d get an email 20 times a day saying approved, approved, approved to each loyalty points request,” Palmer says. “What we did was create a workflow that allowed our FOH employees to send a request for points approval to the store’s manager, who could then approve the points increase directly from their phone.”
I built dropdown menus for any type of equipment students could check out, which allowed our team to simply fill a text-field with the barcode on our equipment.”
-Ryan Maier, IT Support Services Manager
The IT department at Ringling College of Art and Design spends a lot of time handling student requests for equipment checkouts. Before they tracked the assets and handled the process through the service catalog, the process was very manual. Requests often lacked specific information, causing IT staff members to spend valuable time chasing down the specifics of a request.
“This form then gets submitted through the service catalog, with an approval process attached so that the students are required to agree to the terms of the rental,” Maier says. “Essentially, this acts both as a checkout process and a contract for the students.”
It’s not just IT doing this internally. It’s People Operations, facilities, the data team, and engineering.”
-Gregory Wojtkun, IT Director
Pluralsight is growing quickly. They’ve recently doubled their workforce to 1000 employees, and Wojtkun thinks it could double again by 2019. They’ve managed to maintain an award-winning culture throughout this business success (they recently went public), and the ability to connect employees to internal services through the service catalog has played a key role.
“Right now, we’re in the service catalog optimization phase,” Wojtkun says. “We’re figuring out what those initiatives are going to be as we scale as a company.” 
