Application Service Provider - how to define services

Christine13 · ‎03-11-2022

We are structured very similar to an application service provider. We have an IT department that provides services to our business units (like hosting). These business units have clients that they produce sites and applications for. We are in the process of mapping these services. One of the questions that has come up is do we define Services and Service Offerings for these business units and the services they provide to their clients?

One of the reasons this has come up is we have application services for these systems but they dont map to any of the existing service and service offerings. Our services are defined for the services we provide to our customers (the business units). But should we also define services that we provide to our clients? If not we are not sure where to associate the application services that are created for these sites and systems the business units create.

Christian Prob2 · ‎03-15-2022

Hi Christine,

the short answer would be if you are not missing anything don't go out and create Services and Service Offering just because it feels they are missing.

That said, how are SLA for those external facing services measured and by whom? Also, it sounds like you are not using ServiceNow to register external clients as "subscribers" to those services?

In that case, you may be just fine...

Christian

Please mark helpful or correct if deemed so. Thank you.

Christine13 · ‎03-15-2022

We do feel we are missing something as our (internal) clients (in the business unit) want to know status of their services. So while the external would not subscribe the internal would. But we are struggling to identify what those services would be.

The SLA for the service provided to the external clients would be managed by the business units. The SLA for the underlying infrastructure and hosting the IT group provides would be managed by the IT department.

So its like we would have technical services underlying the business services. But we dont know if that is correct to define the business services our business units provide to the external customers.

Kristine Naess · ‎03-15-2022

Hi Christine,

I think we might be in a similar situation. We are a corporation with about 250 sub-companies all receiving IT services from our company. We have to report on SLA and pricing to our internal business units as well as our child companies (Transfer Pricing units). For this, we are planning to use business services and service offerings. We already use Business services for cost allocation (we use the Servicenow cost model for this), but to achieve the level of granularity we need on our SLA reporting, we will use our service offerings. The plan is to use the contract table to relate service offerings, service commitments and SLAs to the relevant companies. This is something we need to prove that we have formalized as contracts.

We will also add them in the Subscribed by Company list on the service offering so that it will be easier to report SLAs and service commitments that way.

If the Vendor field on the service offering is empty, we will interpret that as an offering we deliver without a sub vendor, whereas if it is filled in, there should be a related contract pointing to the formal agreement with that vendor.

Since we have only just started this I would greatly appreciate any second opinions on this so that we avoid legacy data and structure.

Cheers,

Kristine