The Telecom Operator's Three Catalogues
A telecom operator maintains three catalogues: a commercial catalogue owned by marketing, an IT service catalogue owned by service management, and a CMDB owned by operations. Together they hold 1,100 offerings; an audit finds 240 apparent duplicates and an 11% mismatch between prices shown to sales and prices billed. Subscriptions live in the billing system and are not linked to service contracts; entitlement checks are manual and take four hours per enterprise order. Procurement signs supplier agreements and calls them service contracts. The new CIO wants one catalogue and one contract record, has 18 months and no budget to replace the billing system. You are asked which IT4IT functional components should be authoritative for which data object aspects, how to resolve duplicates without losing audit history, and how to interpret single source of truth.
1. Designate the authoritative component for the Service Offering definition and for its price and availability, and justify the split.
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The Service Offering definition belongs with Service Portfolio Management in S2P: it decides which services the IT organisation will offer, to which segments, with which service levels and lifecycle status. That is a portfolio decision and must be consistent with strategy, policy and investment. Price and availability belong with the R2F offer and catalogue components, because that is where a consumer-facing offer is published, requested, subscribed to and charged. The commercial catalogue should consume the definition; it should not invent it.
The split is by data object aspect and decision right, not by database. Definition is a supply-side decision; price and availability are demand-side commitments. If marketing owns both, prices diverge from cost and policy; if operations owns both, the catalogue becomes a CMDB view with no commercial meaning. The reconciliation key is a stable offering identifier and version, plus a contract identifier for each subscription. Where one tool holds both aspects, IT4IT still requires named authority per aspect; otherwise the 11% mismatch will recur.
Supplier agreements in procurement remain Agreements, not Service Offerings or Service Contracts. Linking them to the offering is useful for cost, but it does not transfer authority.
2. How should the 240 duplicates be resolved without destroying audit history? Give decision criteria.
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Do not start with merge or delete. First establish identity: two offerings are duplicates only if they refer to the same service, the same consumer segment, the same service level and the same period. A duplicate that serves a different segment or includes a different support tier is a legitimate variant and should be related, not merged. Second, test usage: offerings with no active subscription, no contract and no request in 12 months are retirement candidates. Third, preserve history by retiring the record with a relationship to the surviving offering rather than deleting it; contracts and invoices must still resolve.
The criteria, in order: same service specification; overlapping validity period; same consumer segment and terms; active dependencies. Merge only where there are no active contracts or where contracts can be re-pointed with consent. Retire where there is no usage but retain a tombstone record. Re-create only where the identifier itself is corrupt and no relationships exist. This is slower than a dedupe script, but it protects the contract and billing trail that the audit cares about.
3. What does single source of truth mean in IT4IT, and what does it not mean?
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It means a single authoritative source per data object aspect, with other components referencing it rather than copying and editing it. It does not mean one database or one tool. IT4IT expects a backbone of shared data objects with clear ownership and state transitions, integrated across functional components. The Service Offering definition can be authoritative in S2P while price and availability are authoritative in R2F, provided both use the same identifier and the relationship is maintained.
Applied here, the agency should stop arguing about which catalogue wins and instead assign each attribute: name and service level to portfolio; price and availability to offer management; configuration to configuration management; contract terms to R2F. Then enforce create-read-update rules at the interface. The test is whether a consumer can get a consistent answer without knowing which system holds it. If two systems can independently change the same aspect, there is no single source of truth regardless of how many catalogues are consolidated.