HERM describes capabilities and the systems that deliver them. The EDUCAUSE model gives those a customer-facing service taxonomy — a shared way to name, group, and compare IT services across institutions, in language the people who consume them understand.
The Higher Education IT Service Catalog (EDUCAUSE working group, second edition, 2019) is a reference taxonomy for the IT services a college or university offers. It is deliberately product-agnostic — it names services by the outcome they deliver, not by the vendor product behind them — so institutions can compare, collaborate, and benchmark on a common vocabulary.
Its purpose is the customer's question the estate model does not directly answer: not what system is this, but what service can I get, who is it for, and how do I request it. It is the outward-facing face of the estate.
The catalog nests from broad to specific — the catalog holds categories, each category holds services, each service holds offerings. Reproduced from the EDUCAUSE service catalog model (Figure 4).
Figure 4, EDUCAUSE Higher Education IT Service Catalog (2nd ed., 2019). A fourth part — service attributes — describes each service and offering.
Each tier lines up with a layer of this site's model:
A logical grouping of related services managed together for budgeting and governance — six to ten per catalog. Maps onto HERM value chains.
An end-to-end service that delivers an outcome — named by result, not product. Maps onto HERM capabilities and the systems that deliver them.
The specific product or activity used to deliver a service. Maps onto the systems and platform modules in the interactive catalog.
Key information about each service or offering — owner, audience, service levels, cost, how to request it. Different views show different attributes to different audiences.
EDUCAUSE offers these as a starting template — most institutions land on six to ten categories, tailored locally. The full 2019 taxonomy names 52 end-to-end services across the eight categories. Open a category to see its services; each maps onto HERM capabilities and the systems that deliver them.
Category and service descriptions below are quoted and condensed from the source paper.
HERM and the EDUCAUSE catalog are two faces of the same estate. HERM is the internal architecture view — capabilities, data, applications, technology. The EDUCAUSE catalog is the external service view — what a customer can request and who owns it. Join them and each service in the catalog traces to the capabilities and systems that deliver it, and each system in the model rolls up to the services people actually see.
The eight service categories align with HERM's value chains, so governance and budgeting groups share one structure.
A catalog service maps to the HERM capabilities it fulfils — the same spine both models share.
A service offering is a specific system or platform module — exactly what the interactive catalog already records.
Extending the model toward the EDUCAUSE catalog means adding a service-facing layer above the systems already recorded. The model's suggested service attributes are a ready checklist:
Group the systems you have recorded into the eight categories, name the end-to-end service each supports, and fill the attributes — owner, audience, how to request it. The result is a public service catalog whose every entry traces back to the architecture beneath it, so the front door and the blueprint finally agree.
Model, the eight categories, and all 52 services are drawn from The Higher Education IT Service Catalog, A Working Model for Comparison and Collaboration, Second Edition (EDUCAUSE Working Group Paper, November 2019). Category and service descriptions here are quoted and condensed; see the source for the full taxonomy and the complete list of service attributes.