Building Services for the 1st Time Lessons Learned

[alexbt1639]

All -

Soon our company is undergoing a zBoot, and we'll be re-launching our platform free from customization and with SN Discovery. What are the best practices to building out App/Business/Tech services since we've never done them before? The good news is we do have a solid list of Business Apps from our previous Business Apps table, and I am confident SN Discovery will go a long way here. Any tips or deployment plans are much appreciated!

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @alexbt1639 

It's great that you have a solid Business Application Inventory. This gives you a great head start in populating the Service Delivery domain.

I would consider Foundational data first - Users, Groups, Locations, Product Models (often overlooked - if you can't manage Models then your CI and Asset tables will end up in a mess), Companies, Departments, Business Units and Knowledge)

I would also start thinking about Service Portfolios - think of it like filling out a jigsaw. If you can map out your portfolios then you're working on the jigsaw from a clear reference image. Without it you are kind of guessing!

For example, if you classify all of the Technology Management portfolio taxonomy layers it really helps understand what services need to be created, and therefore where to get the Applications and infrastructure from.

Discovery, or something similar, is pretty much essential. If your low-level CMDB is inaccurate or incomplete then your data will have huge gaps or inconsistencies that will render any understanding of impact pretty much useless. However have some thought as to how your will connect the infrastructure CIs in your CMDB to your application layer. Some form of Service Mapping, certain Service Graph Connectors (e.g. Dynatrace) or similar are important - otherwise you have to link these things manually, which is a time consuming, expensive and ultimately frustrating experience. Whichever route you take, credentials and access to discover devices will be one of the biggest challenges so address this with security and app/infra SMEs early.

I believe the data foundations team plan to release outcome-based use cases that mean you don't need to build the full model from start to finish (for now), so if those look more useful to you, take that route. Not sure, but they may already be published.

However, experience has taught me that Business Apps tied to infra, linked to services where you have already mapped out the portfolio starts to give you the main components of a service-aware CMDB - which is really the whole point of the model, and the primary value to your organisation.

Finally - don't neglect organisational change - this is often a big step for stakeholders working in this space; some will be unwilling to change or resistant; others may raise security/access concerns or refuse to allow you to store device credentials in ServiceNow (which can be circumvented by integrating with a credential store like CyberArk), or be simply too busy to get involved, so ensure that senior management affords you access to and time with the necessary resources, and approve a change lead for this program, because it is a huge program of work for any organisation. Implement by stealth and don't be surprised if adoption is poor, or non-existent. ROI then becomes a much harder sell 😉

I hope this helps!

Mat

[Jim41]

This statement seems impossible "platform free from customization"   we seem to get a new manager that thinks  "lets just customize in ServiceNow"  I've seen it happen time and time again. How do you plan to manage  "the out of the box" concept and has anyone ever done this on the platform other than ServiceNow?  Thank you