Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

Data center outsourcing is done for purposes of change, not cost.  It may be viewed as a cost saving, but what quickly happens is described in the article below.  What most organizations have done is staff their data center with very expensive resources where the outsourcer has a more appropriate model.

Outsourcing brings the change that organizations are often hesitant and cannot do on their own, standardize processes and remove human resources with appropriately skilled folks.  Not all services delivered from IT require all nighters to support.  Defining service value and supporting services for the cost and value they deliver for the organization is right sizing your IT.

Using tools to measure and automate and evolving your skilled resources into analysts and service providers is the change that is difficult to make.  The service provider market is exploding with cloud services and are hungry for your business.  The service providers know the cost of delivering services and balance the costs with appropriately skilled resources with the appropriate responsiveness to the service.  This is the model IT organizations need to reward rather than the hero culture.

Do you reward heros or service analysts?

Michele

___________________

The “stay up all night, do anything for the user” hero culture of corporate IT may win friends in the business, say outsourcing consultants at TPI and Compass, but it won’t yield real business-IT alignment. And it makes it almost impossible to succeed at outsourcing.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This is the second offering like this I’ve seen in a week.  The first was the British Airways announcement with the software and service provider vendor.  This is a classic example of  a shift in the market and commoditization of some back office functions.  Great examples of business service management functions and knowing which services are commodity for cost versus those that are value and differentiate your services in the market place.

These are offerings and movements that enterprise IT shops should watch and take notice of in determining what is really value add and unique and most of all needs to be unique in your organization.  Leverage service offerings for the commodity services and accept standard processes so as to drive down costs and evolve your organization and roles to drive business growth with technology.

Are you merely powering the business or are you driving the business with technology?

Michele

___________________

Supports energy and network providers in their daily back office business with its portfolio of modular IT offerings

Deutsche Telekom has introduced complete Software as a Service (SaaS) package via the Internet for the energy industry.  (Read Full Article…)

Business service management practices are about understanding your costs and the value of services to the business so that IT manages as services appropriately.  I can hardly read an article these days that isn’t cloud or as-a-Service related.  I enjoy these and the transformation it is driving as it is long over due for most IT organizations.  When I wore an analyst hat and I would field inquiry calls regarding outsourcing, I would always start by saying you don’t outsource for cost savings.  I find these days with the flexible payment and contract options that we are being short sided and seeing these offerings as the low cost option.

Unless you are hideously inefficient, it really isn’t cheaper.  You outsource for change or to right source the services in your organization and drive standards.  Let me explain a bit more.  When you move portions of your IT to the cloud, a service provider, as-a-Service option, to a managed service provider or a full service outsourcing organization, they are still in the business to make a profit and you need to factor some time and resources (costs) to manage the provider.  The estimate to manage the provider is 3-7% of the cost of the contract, generally.  So this is one piece to factor into the overall cost, but change that is too difficult to create in your environment is another factor.  Short story of it, implementing standards.

So in some cases it may drive down costs with lower cost resources and standards, but that isn’t an apples to apples comparison to your current service offering.  However, it is the right reason to move the commodity to a service provider because we come full circle – not all services are created equal.  In-house data centers find themselves staffing the services with expensive resources and managing the services very similarly across the board.

So this is the driving down cost of the equation in right sourcing and creating change and standards, on the other side of the coin I read a lot about supporting the devices of our employees.  By not taking on the capex of buying smart phones, tablets, etc., but taking on the expensive support cost to support the devices of our employees.  I can guarantee you the service providers will tax you for this non-standard practice.  I can see the debate on both sides, you deemed they didn’t require the device or accessibility for their role, but they allowed themselves to be accessible if you support the device.  I would caution against this practice without fully evaluating the security and support costs of doing so.

We are in the midst of great change and there will be an ebb and flow as budgets loosen.  I find it exciting times and also find that there will be real success stories and others that may not enjoy the same success.

Are you right sizing your services and sourcing options?

The Hub Commentary

SaaS as the article describes is followed with a ton of hype in these days of the cloud and transformation to business service management versus the commodity at the lower level.  The short term cost appeal with the subscription model and ease at which you can subscribe generates a lot of the hype.  I believe in the model and again always suggest first going back to basics and identify your services and classify them giving you a sense of what you need to service and support.

Once you understand the value of a service to your business, you can start evaluating whether it is a commodity process or specialized, market differentiators for your business.  Specialized services do not lend themselves well to these types of models.  Well defined and common services/process es are well suited for these models and should be used for that purpose.  In fact, they should be employed to drive standards into your organization and right size your service and support, which is hard to do from the inside once high levels of service have been delivered.

Another factor to consider is not all software was developed to be effectively used in a shared model and may not offer the economies of scale that a true shared service can offer.  As the folks at Forrester indicate, the commodity management, monitoring and lower in the stack items are well suited for this model as they should be standardized and common so your valuable resources can focus on driving business growth with technology over monitoring “box on / box off” lights.

Michele

___________________

Given all the hype SaaS (software as a service) has garnered, you might be inclined to think every category of software will be delivered predominantly from the cloud at some point. Not so, says a new Forrester Research report.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I would agree that IT is commoditizing and the role of IT leaders is evolving much like my good friend Siki indicates where commodity services can be done elsewhere and which then frees the evolved IT resources to sit at the table as Diane describes to apply technology to business choices.  This is the practices of business service management in action.

In the featured post, Finding your Services, I describe first classifying your services based upon their contribution and cost to the business.  How you deliver (source) that service then becomes the next choice.  Just because you have technical capability in-house to deliver the service does not mean you keep it in house.  Many services are becoming commodity and should be shipped out of the data center.  On the other extreme, where you are seeking to deliver new and innovative services to the market to drive growth, but you may not have the expertise in-house to deliver it timely enough, you may also choose to seek outside assistance.

Again, it becomes a balancing act between operating and growth and weighing the cost and value of in-house versus external options.  Then the new role of IT becomes that which is described by both Siki and Diane, one of the facilitator of services that both operate and drive the business.  We are in unique times of role evolution and this will become uncomfortable for the traditional IT staff.

Are you driving business with technology or just operating?

Michele

___________________

This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company’s business offerings.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This headline caught my eye as I will be the first to debate that IT is not a profit center.  However, this is a prime example of IT realizing and classifying services based upon Service Value and applying Business Service Management practices.  In an effort to first cut support costs from old systems, right sourcing decisions and partnerships were established for industry must haves and I applaud these decisions.

I’ve seen this consortium model a couple of times in my career and it can be successful when set-up like this with the outsourcer as the intermediary managing the infrastructure and service with the ability to market, sell and replicate the solution across the industry.  The service is an industry standard and not specific to the business and thus no competitive advantage across the industry.  However, what usually keeps it from being successful is the size of the market that it can be sold to and how easily the others in the industry can just plug into the service.

The tipping point to concentrate on growth investments for IT and decrease the IT spend for cost saving measures may be enough to push to consortium like success for these types of services in the coming 12-24 months.

Michele

___________________

Give a man a fish, the proverb goes, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Turns out there’s a quasi-corollary for corporate IT: Give your company a more efficient system, and you cut costs; give your industry a better way to operate, and you increase revenue.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Hooray!  Great post by Mary on the management and service level management requirements for the cloud.

Michele

___________________

IDC is forecasting that the total cloud systems management software market will total $2.5 billion by 2015. This market will encompass virtualization management, automated provisioning, self serve provisioning portals, dynamic consumption based metering and capacity analysis, service catalogs, end-to-end real time performance monitoring and related management software tools deployed into public and private cloud environments.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to.  How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud?  How secure should you make the data and management of the VM?  What business services are at risk?

It is the end-to-end service view that needs to also be considered up front when architecting your plans for cloud deployment and that should be based upon the service value and risk of the overall service.  Mapping those services, understanding cost, risk and value will aid in making these decisions, architecting the VMs and putting the proper monitoring, management and measurement of the VMs and services in total.

Check out my Feature Post on classifying services.

Michele

___________________

Over the past few years, we have seen a gradual transition from traditional computer center with dedicated resources to virtual machines and cloud computing.  During this time, people have realized some of the value of virtualization in termsof savings and resource optimization.  Unfortunately, there are still a number of warts in the virtualization that have followed the migration to the cloud.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This article inspired me to write a full blown feature on the subject of vendor management, service level measurement/management/communication and basic business service management practices.  The net of it, IT you own it – no shifting blame to others and no government intervention to set up terms and conditions.  This is outsourcing, plain and simple – manage your provider.

Read the feature commentary in this post.  I do predict there will be a very large outage in 2011, it will be a brand name company, there will be hype based headlines and buried deep in the article disguised in hype will be the root cause – poor contractual terms and conditions, poor vendor management and complete lack of service level measurement keeping perception in check with reality!

Michele

___________________

Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing…. (Read Full Article…)

Face it, we all blame our siblings for everything that goes wrong, in my case my baby brother – who towers over me.

Today I’m writing an article instead of just sharing the news having spent a little time consulting and reviewing major sourcing contracts for customers and being trained in the Ross Perot bootcamp of outsourcing early in my career.  What I always find amazing is how much trust a subscriber puts in the provider during the contract negotiation.  On one hand there is trust (I call it naivety) and the provider was successful in creating a relationship, playing on emotion and expertise in the market.  On the other hand it is a recipe for disaster,  a lose – win situation for you the subscriber.  Know your rights.

Cloud computing is still just outsourcing, however, agile and dynamic technology enables a more dynamic purchasing option than in an early adopter phase.  What differentiates the providers at this time is their maturity to manage the services and service level agreements and the flexibility of their services.  When the market matures, we will reach a state of similar services, standard agreements and get down to price based decisions.  Price based decisions currently reflect the “buying” of a customer base and immature operating processes.  Buyer beware in these situations of early adopter buying and low cost options – shame on you the buyer.

Here’s my usual SLA and sourcing advice.  Outsource the commodity, the services that are absolutely the same regardless of industry, stop being unique, special and different and accept the standard and low cost option.  Go back to my Service Value chart.  Remember you still own the services and you can’t blame your sibling.  To that point, you own the service level – availability, performance, response, contract termination, etc.  Just remember the more stringent you are with the terms the greater the risk to the provider and the higher the cost.  Evaluate their standard terms and fill in the gaps, but fill them in appropriately based upon the value of the service.  Do not tell the provider “how” to deliver the service or how to manage the infrastructure, you are outsourcing for a reason.

My prediction for this year is that a major customer will engage with a major provider and there will be a major outage this year and there will be front page headlines creating noise how the cloud fails.  I will point back to front page Wallstreet Journal news of just about 10 years ago.  IBM, Seibel and SAP fail and Hershey misses Halloween – their largest candy selling season.  Pages and pages of an article playing to the hype of the big names and the market and failure.

I remember exactly where I was when I read the paper, waiting on my relentlessly late co-worker in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.  Net of the story, change management and testing issue and Hershey found we are not loyal to chocolate.  We will go to another drugstore for a brand of toothpaste, but when we want chocolate we will take what is on the shelf.  Moral of the story was Hershey missed Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter to sort out their order to distribution challenges for what they thought was “14 days, we can fix anything in 14 days”.

I predict the same hype will occur here and it will boil down to a mismanaged, lack of defined and monitored SLA’s.  Just because you subscribe to a service does not alleviate you from the responsibility of the service and contract.

Monitoring, management and measuring cannot be an afterthought – how are you monitoring your service provider(s)?

The article that riled me up for this post is the following:

Cloud Computing (still) Needs a Bill of Rights – ZDNet

Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing:  (Read Full Article….)

The Hub Commentary_

I feel like changing things up here in Business Service Management land today.  This blog caught my attention as it describes the leap of going from an independent software vendor (ISV) to a SaaS offering.  It has challenges in how the software is architected so that it can then later be hosted and ultimately used by many customers in a single, multi-tenant environment to take full advantage of the economies of scale.  The fact is most are run in dedicated environments to short cut this challenge.

The piece I find curious and would debate is why should an ISV turn into the service provider?  I would be highly speculative of these situations as most lack the experience to make that leap to manage a data center.  Best to partner with a hosting provider with th expertise in managing and running software and stick to what you know best – the application.

Now relating this back to the topic of Business Service Management, the application needs to be instrumented or as I call it, service enabled.  Data needs to be sent to the monitoring and management technology to provide basic health and availability and thus the need for that middleware testing the performance of the hosting provider as well as application performance data.  The cloud and service provider models bring great agility, but all point to the requirement for an integration platform to provide that end-to-end service view.

How are you measuring your service providers?

Michele

___________________

Sinclair’s recent post Cloud Middleware: The Language Shared by Network Engineers and Developers posits that the cloud space has seemingly maintained a bias towards infrastructure offerings (IaaS) and is now at an “inflection point” where a common layer – the cloud middleware layer – will be required by developers and network managers alike to, as Jeff Kaplan puts it: Bridge the Great Divide in Cloud Computing.  I’d like to expand on this theme.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This week there has been significant buzz around this acquisition and I’ve held off posting and referring to any of the articles.  Lydia of Gartner sums it up well with her blog of yesterday.  One in debt without a sales team and the other in need of data center footprints and a sales force in need of a ticket to the CIO.

Infrastructure and the management of it has no doubt become the commodity in IT.  The acceleration to the cloud and subscription or back to the old days of timeshare on the IBM computers is here.  Now the trick is architecting your services, managing them and the service provider, while balancing costs and value.  This new model has much to offer and is the future, but has many pitfalls that can be a cost drain.

I expect before year end we will hear about how the model fails and what you will find in the middle of what will be a very lengthy article will be a lack of proper vendor and service management.  Renting the infrastructure does not alleviate the instrumentation responsibility to make the workloads intelligent and service enabled back to your management platform or the integration across providers and platforms to manage the end-to-end service.  Then there is that pesky relationship with the vendor.

How are you architecting your workloads of the future?

Michele

___________________

A couple of days ago, Verizon bid to acquire Terremark, for a total equity value of $1.4 billion. My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are issuing a First Take on the event to Gartner clients; if you’re looking for advice and the official Gartner position, you’ll want to read that. This blog post is just some personal musings on the reasons for the acquisition.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

I cannot escape the cloud discussion today and must say that I agree with Don and his article this week in contrast to the other I just posted today.  Business Service Management practices, Service Level measuring and management of the service regardless of where it runs is the responsibility of the service provider – IT.

Having a view of the overall service, who’s doing what and how each component is performing is the value of the integrated end-to-end view of services IT delivers to the business.  Take advantage and evaluate the most cost efficient and best use of your resources when evaluating where it should be deployed, however, do not forget you must still instrument it to be managed and measured.

Service levels are a key component when engaging with the service providers.  You want to define your expectations for service availability, performance and responsiveness to an incident, but you need to map your requirements to the value delivered by the service.  Exercising your right to define very stringent service levels only increases the price, balance your real requirements with your service level requirements.

Are you measuring your service provider and cloud services?

Michele

___________________

(Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

All the news these days seems to be about the cloud.  This is a nice summary of things to consider, however, leaves out the usual after thought that makes or breaks new technology deployment – management of it.  Business Service Management practices and instrumenting for management and measuring performance should be a factor to consider when planning a movement to the cloud.

All services, applications and technologies will be scrutinized in the coming year for suitability to be deployed in the cloud or some mixture of cloud and in-house resources.  One important factor will be the service levels and how you will measure the service in conjunction with in-house services for value to the business as well as monitoring the service provider for performance.  Without the performance monitoring and instrumentation to manage the service, it becomes a he said / she said debate regarding the perception of service quality.

Just because you move services to the cloud, you do not alleviate the requirements to manage and measure the services for service value.

How are you measuring your cloud providers?

Michele

___________________

Everyone is talking about cloud and they want to implement the same in their companies. CIOs are the first people who will get the work on this new initiative or change. This article will give them the quick overviews on what all are the factors needs to be considered during cloud movement.  (Read Full Article…)

We had a snow storm the other day, during the night we lost power and by morning, the house was cold.   I was able to get on the internet with my laptop which has a cellular wireless connection as well as my cell phone.   I checked some emails for work purposes and then went to the electric companies website to see if there were any details on the power outage in my area.   I found a link on the home page which lead me to an up to date map on outages and details on the outages.   From this map I was able to find my location on the map, click on the red circle and get estimates on when the service (electricity) would be restored.

It is nice to see a service provider that leverages technology, by them having an up to date website with details on the services they are providing to me, I will not be calling into them to speak to a representative for an update.  Granted, for this type of situation the dial in method would probably have some very long generic recording, just not sure I’d be interested in listening to the whole thing before hitting buttons to get directed to a human being.

The moral of the story, having dashboards for customers to log into to check on the services a service provider is providing was at one time a differentiator, it is now an assumed feature of the service being provided.     The same is true for the IT department.  I want to log into a dashboard to check on my active helpdesk tickets and planned maintenance and active outages (with updates on when they will be resolved).

Business Service Management is the methodology for gathering all of the details and populating the dashboard for the customers.

The Hub Commentary_

Computer Technology Industry Association just released results from their latest survey indicating that:

• Global IT spending up 4% in 2011
• 45% of US IT firms are increasing spending on new products and business for the next six months
• 43% plan technology related investments

All great news!  IT time to line yourself up as a service provider and compete for your data center business.  IT can do it cheaper than the service provider who has to build in margin, however the question remains, can IT do it faster and better than the service providers?

Is your data center competing with the Service Providers effectively?

Michele

___________________

IDG News Service — Members of the U.S. IT sector are more confident now in their business prospects than they have been in the last year and a half, according to a new survey released by the Computing Technology Industry Association.  (Read Full Article…)

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”.  The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc.  Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

I received many great questions and discussion, which still says ITIL is alive and well in the ranks of IT organizations, trainers, consultants, certifying organizations, etc.  I do want to mention again, I do not see the practices and advice dying, going away or becoming replaced, just that the outward facing conversations will and need to stop being about ITIL and need to start being about the business service, value and performance.  ITIL is merely advice on how to manage your internal operations efficiently.

The catalyst in the market is the cloud and the explosive growth of service providers.  They need to have good operational processes in place or they are one outage away from being out of business.  However, the difference is they are not talking about ITIL, they are talking about the benefits to the business and the simplicity of running and subscribing to services in The Cloud.

The business leader has an internal organization  talking about justifying a CMDB project and a cloud provider talking about monthly subscriptions to online purchasing systems at a monthly or usage fee and here is a rate card, use it like a credit card.  Did I just see that leader walk away from the project justification discussion table and walk off into the sunset all googly eyed with the cloud service provider?

Last night I pulled another article from CIO regarding the innovation expectations the business has for its IT organization.  Embrace the development of innovating services and automate the commodity, routine, mundane that merely powers the lights – free yourself to drive growth.

I had a discussion with a very large and mature cloud service provider organization this morning on just the topic of providing the value add transparency on top of their services – the dashboard view that will communicate service performance to their customers.  The providers know that the business wants transparency and the providers want to insure that there isn’t a perception challenge regarding service delivery and the ones that will be most successful are baking it into there infrastructure and services from the beginning.  IT, are you or are you still talking about ITIL?

I’ve digressed, but the example is clear.  Those that sell technology services for a living know how to speak to your business leaders and how to bake proper service monitoring, management, measuring and communication into their services.  Steal a play from their playbook – implement and deliver the communication of service performance and service value into your services and sell your services, not the process of building services.

Are you communicating Service Value by selling the car or are you still selling the parts and directions as to how to build the car?

Michele

The conversation IT has with the business must change this year and this is the year of transformation predicted back in 2003 by Nicholas Carr in his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.  The cloud, virtualization and the growing number of service providers with as-a-Service options are the catalyst that will force this transformation in market time during 2011.

If you have kept up with my news posts this week, I swear I was unable to find much news to comment and post on that did not have to do with the service providers and transformation.  My favorite post of all is the CIO article, “ITIL vs The Cloud:  Pick One”, REALLY?  You are kidding right?  This and another post, “Consider the Cloud a Solution, not a Problem” are exactly the headlines and mentality that will send IT jobs To the proverbial Cloud, just as Nicholas Carr predicted.

The way we manage technology and our processes today should not hold us in the past.  Amazon is doing it again.  Amazon changed the industry from bricks and mortar retail to online, almost overnight.  Transform or die, it happened and is happening again.  Amazon is offering infrastructure as-a-Service, purchasable on a credit card.  Now let’s start watching the leaders in each industry flip flop based upon those who embrace new technology, agile development AND have the foresight to service enable their workloads instead of dissing and complaining about what and how much monitoring Amazon should be responsible for.  IT is responsible for measuring and communicating service performance, instrument your workloads and inject them with the intelligence required to communicate service performance.  These will be the transformational leaders of tomorrow.

Communicating service performance is on IT, are you making the transformation?

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

“Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their services are new to the market and are unproven,” Gartner  Yes, this does describe Amazon and EC2, but does that mean it is 2 steps behind the Leaders?  Not often are there times to truly innovate and redefine a market.  Amazon and EC2 are redefining an industry regardless of internal enterprise IT or the consumer market.  Their customers are a mixture now over the traditional IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IT service providers.

To the innovator go the initial spoils, revenue in the market.  Will or can they sustain that leadership will play out over time.  Given where we are in the life cycle of this disruptive technology (mostly development and test) in Enterprise IT shops, EC2 brings just the agility required for businesses to drive agile development of new products and services and move to market faster than ever before mimicking the consumer market.

In order to take these early development projects to production, yes, more formalized monitoring and management will no doubt need to be baked in.  Now the question becomes, who bakes that in and supplies that information?  Isn’t that agent part of the workload that is packaged and shipped out to the cloud to run on the subscribed to infrastructure?  I call this service enabling your workload and injecting intelligence into it for purposes of monitoring, securing and communicating the performance of the workload the subscribers responsibility.  Right?  The provider is responsible for the infrastructure your workload runs on, not what’s going on in the workload, that remains the responsibility of the subscriber.

I applaud Amazon and say keep challenging the status quo.  IT and the traditional proven providers need to think a little out of the box to meet the demands of market dynamics in market time! What do you think?

Michele

___________________

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report has placed Amazon’s cloud computing service in one of its lower tiers, saying that for all of Amazon’s commercial success it is “visionary” but “unproven.”  (Read Full Article…)

I ran across this article the other day by Doug Mueller and it reminded me of the multi-layer Service Catalog.  I’m not sure if this is an actual term or not, but it’s a good description of what it is.  If you take a very large organization that is broken up into distinct areas such as the teams that support:

• Hardware & Operating Systems
• Technologies (web servers, databases, messaging bus, etc)
• Applications (email, timesheet, payment processing)

For mature IT groups, they typically will drive towards a list of supported hardware and support operating systems, they will also typically drive towards a list of support technologies that will be supported within the environment.  On top of these, some common applications (or services) are then provided to the employees such as email and the corporate web server.

If you walk through this, each of those teams has their own Service Catalog (and as Doug said, a Service Request Catalog).   Someone in the technology area, after significant research wants to make this new technology available for sharing documents.  The person requests from the hardware group for hardware and an operating system to be provisioned for this technology to run on.

Someone in the application area then decides to tie the document sharing, email, web and video together for a collaboration solution, so they in turn request services.  The end users then request access to the collaboration service.

I have seen a few different approaches to this such as different links on the internal website to request hardware w/OS and another set of  links to get applications/technologies installed to simple help desk requests.   Regardless, while it may not be a full fledge electronic Service Request Catalog at each layer, there are lists of approved hardware, operating systems and technologies for many companies.

Tobin