Preparing to Design Services

This chapter contains the following topics:

Preparing to Design Services

This chapter covers the overview steps for designing services.

Defining the Service Taxonomy

Define the taxonomy of a service before you start designing a service. Consider the following before creating services in the service designer module:

  1. Decide what services to offer to an end user in the service catalog
  2. Standardize these services
  3. Create descriptions
  4. Define request fulfillment workflows and the required user inputs
  5. Arrive at a portfolio of services that can be published in the service catalog.

For example, a services such as desktop, laptop, keyboard could be a part of the New Hire On-Boarding category or Desktop Service category. As the requester clicks on a category, the application drills down to display subcategories or the services associated with the current category.

Get more information about the services you want to offer.

  • What services you will provide?

  • Who provides these services?

  • Who consumes these services?

  • What approvals or reviews are needed before users can purchase services?

  • Who is authorized or required to approve or review service requisitions?

  • What policies (global or local) govern these approvals and reviews?

  • What service levels govern the delivery of these services?

  • Is this service delivered by orchestrating one or more API calls to a domain manager system? If so, what are the APIs, and required parameters?

  • Who performs these delivery activities?

  • Who manages the service delivery?

  • What happens if a service delivery is late or interrupted?

  • What information must the consumer supply in order to purchase a service?

  • What information the service delivery team needs from the consumer?

  • Are there any existing data sources that you need to include?

  • Are there any existing forms that you can use as models for order forms?

  • What assets or items will the services deliver? Will you want to track these items after the services have delivered them?

  • How do you want to present the services to the consumer?

  • What is the best way(s) for consumer to locate the services in the catalog?

Setting Up Services

The table below summarizes the tasks involved in setting up services. After you create the basic services, you may perform the additional tasks to enhance a service form or customize the appearance of the service form. These are summarized in Additional Service Design Tasks table.

Table 1 Designing Services Steps

Task

Sub Tasks

References

1

Analyze business requirement to define the taxonomy of services

-

Planning a Service Design

2

Design your organization, create people, functional positions, configure user roles, grant permissions

If you plan to use the roles defined in your LDAP, you should integrate Cisco Prime Service Catalog with LDAP.

  • Cisco Prime Service Catalog Integration Guide
  • Cisco Prime Service Catalog Administration and Operations Guide

3

Configuring Service Items and Service Categories

Configuring Categories for grouping services on the Service Catalog Storefront module. Configuring Service Items. Configuring Service Item Policy. Define actions governed by policies that will be executed against a service item instance when certain conditions are met Associating Services for a Service Item.

Configuring Categories and Service Items

4

Designing Form for Service Request

Configuring Dictionaries Design an Active Form Component that includes one or more dictionaries. Define Active Form Rules and standards for dynamic form behaviors or to extract data from standard tables.

Configuring Forms for a Service

5

Designing Services for Requesting Service Items

Configuring Services for Delivering Service Items Configuring Bundles of Services for automatically ordering services when a customer orders the bundle (parent). Defining permissions allowed to order a service

Configuring Services and Service Bundles

6

Configuring Additional Attributes for Services

Formatting the service presentation Defining service objectives Configuring Keywords for Search

Additional Services for Designing Services

7

Designing Plan for Delivering Services

Configuring Delivery Plan (workflows) that contains one or more tasks that must be completed to deliver a service to a customer. Configuring authorization, review, and escalation tasks for a service.

Designing Plan for Delivering Services

8

Configuring Rates and Accounts for Billing

Configuring Pricing Configuring Billing rates, User Accounts, and Agreements for Billing transactions

Configuring Rates and Accounts For Billing

9

(Optional) Configuring Services for Communicating with External Systems

If you are designing a service that communicates with external third party systems such as VMware vCenter, or Amazon EC2 directly or through CPO, you will need to:

  • Configure an external service item task
  • Configure an agent

10

Managing the Services and Its Attributes During Service Requisition

Managing the Service Items During the Service Requisition Retrieving History, Subscription Information from the History Managing Order-On-Behalf Service Request

Managing the Services and Attributes

Table 2 Additional Service Design Tasks

Workflow

Reference

Define custom attribute for services and categories to manage the presentation of services and service categories on the landing page of Service Catalog module.

See Extensions in Configuring a Category

Add JavaScript programming to a service form

Interactive Service Forms (ISF) API Overview

Associate the Service with a service item. This allows users and managers to quickly see what services are available for reconfiguring or otherwise adjusting service items previously provisioned for them.

Associating Services for a Service Item

Use Service Item Manager's Import feature to import externally defined service items and standards into Service Catalog, or use the Service Link file adapter to import data for service items or standards.

(Optional) Design Portlets and Portal Pages for Service Portal.

Designing and managing pages and Service portal content. Creating portlets from external or third-party sources, Creating portlets to highlight common services Creating portlets to show users what they already own, with links to services related to those items

Configuring a Billable Rates

Export/ Import a Service from development to testing to production environments.

Exporting and Importing a Service

Backup or migrate your service design to another environment for testing or user acceptance, see Chapter, Managing Content Deployment in Cisco Prime Service Catalog 11.0 Administration and Operations Guide.

Cisco Prime Service Catalog Administration and Operations Guide