Best Practices for Creating New Business Applications and Services in ServiceNow

[Ravish Shetty]

Hi all,

I'm looking to understand the best practices around the creation of new business applications and their associated technical or business services in ServiceNow, particularly from a CSDM-aligned perspective.

A few questions I’m hoping to get insights on:

• How are these typically created in your organization?
• Do end users provide the necessary information? Is there a white glove service involved?
• Are end users given access to tools like the Service Builder? If so, are they trained to use it, or do they rely on knowledge base articles, recorded videos, or other resources?
• Or is this process managed entirely by a centralized team (e.g., CMDB or Service Portfolio Management)?

We are also considering building a custom catalog item that asks user-friendly questions and, based on the responses, automatically creates the required services and service instance records. Before we go down that path, we wanted to check if there’s a simpler or more standardized approach others are using.

Any insights into your workflows, governance models, or automation strategies would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Ravish

[TheJoeDC]

So maybe one question on your maturity, if you are ready to start building business applications out, do you your foundational data nailed down? Single source of truth for locations for example? Org structure to support reporting?

Business Apps aren't CI's and are manually managed. Building out the relationships is something that a dedicated trained team should do rather than the end user. Asking end users what applications they use to fulfill their job duties would help build out the Business Apps and Business Capability. 

[Ravish Shetty]

Hello Joe,

Yes the foundational data are in place and being used albeit with some duplicates.

Thanks, we are also considering driving it through a team to define these services now.