Services Module - What is it, and can it help me with separating my instance by Business Units?

[Ebrunken]

Greetings!

Recently my organization transitioned to servicenow for our IT ticketing, and have looked towards expanding to other disciplines within the organization.  I'm currently working on integrating our Facilities team into this platform and was wondering how to do it in a way that would cleanup things like our categories or subcategories.  

Would Services be the answer to this problem so we don't have 30 different categories at the end of this process?  Is there a best practice for something like this?

I apologize if I've posted in the wrong place but feel like this is an overall architectural issue.  Any information that can be provided would be helpful.

Thanks!

Evan

[Allen Andreas]

Hello,
Is your organization not using a ServiceNow partner for this? Are you part of a BAU type team that has taken over the platform? Are you the system administrator? Letting us know what the scope is and your roles and experience will help.

To your question, IT Service Management would be for IT related issues however, you could technically expand this outward to facilitate other areas, but what would the facilities team to do within the platform? You'd need to talk with them and see if they're providing requests (like desk move, repairs, etc.). This may be a case where your organization would want to consider another ServiceNow product, like Field Service Management. We don't have a lot of information from you to guide you much further at this time.

[Ebrunken]

First and Foremost Allen, thank you for being so prompt to respond to my inquiries as you helped me previously!  I'm the System Administrator for the organization and we switched over from JIRA which was being utilized by the Facilities team as well.  We had partners we were working with and may be striking up conversation with again soon as we are starting to learn more about the dynamics of ServiceNow and the Partner network etc.

In this circumstance, the facilities team would be taking incidents and requests like changing light bulbs, dealing with clogs, repairing furniture, or touching up paint for examples.  I had looked at Field Service Management but it looks like it had a lot of additional features that may not be required.  On one hand, they would see great benefits from being in the platform, but the fear I have is by adding them in, categories would become cumbersome and long winded for our fulfillers so I was looking for an option to mitigate that by either using Services as a means of declaring a business unit and hoping it would allow for me to create different categories that would pertain just to them.

Thanks,

Evan

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Thanks for providing all that and I'm glad I was able to help you before 🙂

You are on the right track with thinking that FSM could have quite a bit more features than what you're looking for so it sounds like rolling them into the platform as it exists today would work. An issue that I commonly see is that if the Incident Management process was mostly crafted to work for/fit one type of business, other businesses that try to roll in either have to conform to it...or...customization comes up.

To start out very easy, the category and subcategory tree isn't actually meant to be the main thing used in incidents anyway. That's the fallback majority of SN customers use because they aren't prepared to use things in more of the CSDM/CMDB way such as using Service Offerings (to auto-populate the Service) and go from there.

For your use case with facilities, you could create a Service Offering tied to Facilities as the Service. Service Offering is the child to Service and the more specific component most would know of on their end. You could for now call the offering Facilities Services and the Service is just Facilities. Then, you could set your categories/subcategories to be dependent upon that and if it's Facilities show just these categories, which then just show these subcategories.

There's a whole bunch of directions you could go with this and a deeper way for sure, but for ease of mind and just stepping into it, this is one approach. We could go down the rabbit whole with talking about service offering subscribers (such as locations if your org has many) and then having different service offerings per location or region or even country. This may be something to consider if you have different facility sites with different offerings/support offerings.

Think about that and let us know your thoughts. Your org may not be ready for a full blown CSDM approach and all that, but I can see a very lite rollout being implemented relatively easily for now using what I mentioned above.

Material to reference: https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-articles/how-to-configure-incident-management-to-align-wit... 

Other discussion: https://www.servicenow.com/community/common-service-data-model-forum/csdm-service-offerings-and-faci...