Keeping the Companies Table Evergreen

[bevo]

How do you keep your Companies Table evergreen? What are best practices? 

cc: @Michael Mindel  

Most of our Manufacturers are auto-populated by Discovery.  We are not using the GRC solution for Vendor Management, but we still need an updated record of our SaaS vendors, value-added resellers, professional services companies, legal entities, and even our customers.  If we could integrate, there would be multiple sources of truth, all writing to the companies table. 

We still have the OOTB access controls, so it's supposed to be the 'user_admin' but I'm not clear on who that person is in our org chart.  (Users and Locations are managed by Workday.... Groups managed by Okta Lifecycle Management.)  If you are delegating this role outside the ServiceNow team, who is getting it?  Or does the most junior system admin just get catalog tasks to manually maintain the list of companies?

Thanks in advance

[Kieran Anson]

The Normalization Data Service (it's free!) is my go to recommendation for reducing the inflated count of company records (that are usable). This is particular advantageous for the CMDB, where company names are represented by numerous values depending on how the OEM represented the value within the system.

In terms of manageability, generally the configuration manager is responsible for this data. It might be aided by those who also create company data manually (ITSM process owners who do vendor management). 

It tends to flex depending on deployed applications too. A company with just ITSM and ITOM requires less overall governance or regular check-in then say a company with CSM, SAM Pro, and HAM Pro

[bevo]

We turned on Normalization Data Service at the very beginning of our journey and I agree; its invaluable at reducing duplicates.

RE: "configuration manager"
Without trying to be snarky, that's not a job title in our HR platform.  On our small team we have 6 internal resources.  Should one of us be considered the "configuration manager?"  I do like the ideal of distributing the responsibility to ITSM process owners, but I don't feel confident to distribute the user_admin role to them.  I'm also wary of "GIGO" of a record producer writing to core tables.  So before I do something custom, asking the community "Who exactly does this at your company?" 
Summary of our team

• Manager ( Platform owner and Sys Admin )
  • Architect / Developer (me)
  • Product Manager ( working from Demand / SPM)
  • Junior Sys Admin
• Manager ( CMDB, Discovery, & ITAM )
  • Engineer ( SAM )

[Kieran Anson · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Not snarky at all, don't worry. When using responsibility titles such as "configuration manager" I've had previous concerns of needing to be a dedicated person. It's more of a responsibility that someone takes on. In large enterprises that can often turn into a team of individuals. 

A couple options I've implemented

• A request item that goes for approval before creating a company record. This item is available to a subset of users, and then approved by an even smaller cadence. The item does the record creation, but the approver simply acts as a point of validation.
• Custom role - introduce a new ACL to allow create to a subset of users
• The ServiceNow team being responsible

The last one being a temporary solution. I've seen it as a point of friction in other orgs.