Review: Developing a Service Catalog for Higher Education Information Technology Services by Andrew H. Lyons

The IT Services web page at Hobart and William Smith Colleges needed to be updated, mainly because it was difficult to navigate; disorganized, and not customer oriented.

The website was in dire need of a major overhaul. To quote Mr. Lyons "Information was grouped according to the technology involved (e.g. networking or database reports), not the end service desired, creating a cumbersome learning curve for customers trying to parse through it. The large amount of information available was presented all together in a large mass of text … that was intimidating to those unfamiliar with the structure and content."

They did everything right. They used an ITIL approach to their development. They used customer feedback on what worked and what didn’t work, and they set some achievable goals. They chose to rebuild the website from scratch, which I think was a mistake. They could have used some of their existing code as a basis for their new site. They used a project management approach involving a “statement of work and project plan documents describing the terms, goals, processes, involved parties, project timeline and milestones, and other information” which resulted in a successful project. Finally they went back to their customers to determine their priorities for the web site. This resulted in a customer oriented development and implementation.