Book excerpt: The Service Catalog is a fundamental IT tool covering the services themselves, default capabilities, measures and primary means of access and provision. In short, it represents the value IT provides to facilitate business operations. Written by industry experts and using real case studies, this valuable title takes the reader beyond the theoretical to focus on the real business benefits of Service Catalogs and how to implement them successfully within an organization: Services are made standard and rational, leading to lower costs and increased service availability Standard service products enable forecasting of demand, leading to better volume discounts from vendors and improved inventory and capacity planning Controls over consumption of services are enhanced The fulfillment of IT services is improved with the catalog. Standardization of services leads to recurrent workflows, rather than relatively expensive one-off projects