Vital Business Functions - where to store in CMDB?

[dho]

What is the best practice for storing an inventory of vital business functions within the CMDB?

[Ashok Sasidhara]

Business capabilities, Business service and Business process would be the most suitable tables depending on what type of data you are planning to populate. You can read about the definitions of these and other related elements in the CSDM 4.0 white paper present in following URL for a detailed understanding:

https://www.servicenow.com/community/presession?client_id=0oawkyhdomINvSrdm0x7&redirect_uri=https%3A...

Reading this whitepaper should hopefully give you a clearer picture about how to proceed. 

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

Agree with @Ashok Sasidhara in that there is no "Business Function" object in the platform, but Business Capabilities, Business Services, and Business Processes are the basic CI classes most related to "Business Functions".   A bit more on these:

Business Capabilities - These are generally a bit more specific and verbose than a business function, but they are hierarchical, so the top level capabilities may be business function related.  For example, a business capability could be "Provide customers a self-service account management function"

Business Services - These should in theory describe the valuable outcomes delivered to business consumers, so again they may be more specific than a basic business function, and they also tend to vary a bit based on the needs of designing the service portfolio to enable desired IT service management and other outcomes.

Business Processes - The use of business processes is quite a bit less established and standardized in the platform, but I would expect these to also be more specific.  For example, a business process could be Sales Opportunity Registration, whereas the business function might be more simply "Sales" or "Sales Pipeline".

Other areas you may want to look at which are not CI classes but may relate to CI classes:

Application Category - This is an attribute of the Business Application CI class, but only if you are using Application Portfolio Management. It points to a table called Application Categories, which generally correlate directly to what most people consider "Business Functions."  For that reason, I would recommend this as the best fit if you are using APM or considering using APM.

Business Units - While these aren't necessarily correlated to Business Functions and are more organizational in nature, they may have relationships to Business Functions.