Should I always use taxonomy nodes when defining my services?

[Bradley Ross]

I think the expected hierarchy of services is [service portfolio] => [taxonomy node] => [service] => [service offering]. 

Taxonomy nodes are flexible because you can have multiple layers of grouping for your services. In my organization, we've had a single "portfolio" for all the services we offer and then we created "service families" as a type of taxonomy node under which we could group services. Now, however, we're wanting to switch from the name "service family" to "service portfolio". 

In that case, I don't need any taxonomy nodes. I could have 14 portfolios and then each portfolio would be filled with services. The default settings yell at you when you don't have a taxonomy node on a service. 

Is there anything bad that happens (like functionality that is lost) if we skip the taxonomy nodes and turn off the business rules that enforce their presence? Would I lose the ability to roll up all my portfolios together for an enterprise view if I don't have a single parent portfolio?

[SebastianKunzke]

Hi Bradley,

Do I understand your use case correctly, that you just want to change the name of your taxonomy layer and therefor you want to change the hierarchy of your taxonomy?

In case it is just a naming question I wouldn't recommend to change the standard, because in long term this could affect future functionality you may want to use. At the moment I only know the service owner workspace, which is using the hierarchy, but you never know, why next feature ServiceNow is releasing.

In case you have some other functionality you can only use on the portfolio level, I would suggest to create a dummy node to be compliant with the data model.

That just my thought, maybe they help.

Kind regards Sebastian

[Alec Hanson]

Hi @Bradley Ross what have you done with this in the end?

[Bradley Ross]

We did what Sebastian suggested. We created a single portfolio at the top level and then create our several "portfolios" as taxonomy nodes. That means we have two layers of objects that are called portfolios spread across two tables. I don't think it is ideal, but it hasn't cause much trouble to this point. 

[jeevitha gopi]

can we map the business application to a taxonomy nodes in a bulk way instead mapping each business application seperately? in a business application table can we update in a bulk in alist view or something?