ITIL: Monitoring and organising available Services in a Working environment

ITIL consists of 5 books that make up the lifecycle management.
The 5 books go hand-in-hand with each other and they support each other through the life cycle.
The ITIL lifecycle is a recursive circle for each process and even for each system until the system has been retired.

Part of the Service Strategy of the lifecycle is that the service portfolio takes shape, and as the lifecycle moves on, so does the service portfolio evolve and change with the environment in which it it resides.

The Service portfolio is a complete set of services that are managed by the service provider.
Management can also use the service provider to make decisions on which ideas are viable and valuable to be developed into a service.
The service portfolio forms part of the Service Knowledge Management System.

For a system to move from the pipeline to the service catalogue we get the overlap phase between the two stages.

The overlap forms part of the service transition of the lifecycle.
The Service Transition includes the management and co-ordination of processes, systems and functions to package, build, test and deploy a release into production.

All the systems that are in production form part of the service catalogue, but only a few systems are available for the client to use. These systems get managed by the SCM (Service Catalogue Management)

SCM (Service Catalogue Management)

• Manage the information in the service catalogue
• It ensures that the service catalogue is correct and updated with all the latest detail, status and interfaces and dependencies of all live or preparing-for-live systems are reflecting in it.
• It also makes sure that the organisation makes the service catalogue available to the necessary authorised customers and users.
•  It also makes sure that the service catalogue supports the changing requirements of all processes.

The service portfolio concept and just like any other concepts, steps, models in ITIL are best practice approaches, it’s not standards. So the words "use it or don’t use it" come into play. You may already have a type a service portfolio in the environment where you are working, but maybe it lacks some type of formalised approach.

So use it or don’t use it.