A catalog that only takes orders
Most ITSM catalogs are good at one thing: turning a request into a ticket. That is fine when the fulfillment also lives in the ITSM tool. It rarely does. A new-starter laptop touches procurement, Intune, Active Directory and Exchange. A cloud sandbox touches AWS and the cost center owner. The catalog item becomes a form, and a technician spends the next hour copying values from the ticket into four other consoles.
Employees feel this as waiting and guessing. They don’t know which portal handles what, so they call the service desk to ask, and those calls show up as ticket volume that has nothing to do with broken things.
What changes after “submit”
In Kinetic the catalog item is attached to a workflow, not a queue. Take a request for access to a finance reporting database:
- The form already knows the requester’s manager, cost center and current groups, pulled from the HR and identity systems.
- Policy decides the approvers. This one needs the data owner and security, in parallel.
- On approval, Kinetic adds the Active Directory group and assigns the Okta app, then records the change in ServiceNow.
- If the database team has to grant a schema permission by hand, that step becomes a task in their usual queue. Everything else is already done.
- The requester watches each step complete in the portal. If one fails, the error goes to the team that owns it and the other steps carry on.
Standard requests can run with no person involved at all. The ones that do need a person get to them with the context already attached.
Fairfax County Public Schools
FCPS supports more than 200 schools and facilities and handles about 250,000 IT requests a year. Before Kinetic, a teacher at one school called the help desk, another filled in a paper form, and a third sent an email; approvals waited in administrators’ inboxes for days. The district put one Kinetic catalog in front of its existing BMC Remedy system, with role-based forms and automatic approval routing. Fulfillment time fell by half, approvals now take minutes, and the catalog doubled in size without new fulfillment staff. Read the FCPS case study.
Once the catalog is running, software provisioning is usually the first area to automate end to end, and the same front door can grow into an employee self-service portal covering HR and facilities. The experience layer page shows how the forms and portal are built.