Towards a semantic information system for IT services

The challenges in IT management are growing in all kinds of organizations. Even small and medium ones are faced with an accelerating variety and disparity of IT services as serious resources, infrastructural elements, as well as outputs of essential business processes. A proved approach to cope with such challenges is a sustainable service orientation; and one reasonable starting point may be an IT service catalog as central information system for all user groups within and outside the organization. The paper describes a project for developing a semantic-web-based IT service catalog in a public university in Germany, starting from the initial situation, moving to requirements and solution space analysis, and finally passing over to the successful development of a prototypical implementation. Along that process, organizational and technical preconditions and decisions, lessons learned, as well as issues and opportunities for further work are discussed.