CSDM and Migration to ServiceNow

[James Turner]

My organisation is investigating a migration from another toolset to ServiceNow, and we are looking at the CSDM information / whitepapers / etc which have been posted. 

Our existing CMDB is reasonably mature and we are looking at the CSDM with interest, but wondering whether CSDM is something we need to consider early in our ServiceNow journey, or if we can deploy a traditional CMDB with a view to expand into the capabilities defined within CSDM once we are Live in the ServiceNow toolset?

Are there any aspects we should keep in mind if we go down a traditional CMDB path which would make our expansion at a later time more straight forward?

Really appreciate the forums thoughts, experiences and advice.

[anurag92]

I am attaching a white paper for Strategy planning for CMDB, not sure if it would be enough for traditional CMDB implementation but it would surely help you in developing strategies.

[Eric Loveshe]

The organization I work for is in a similar position. We just formally made the switch to the Now platform with our initial focus on the CMDB and related ITSM processes. For what it is worth, it is our goal to eventually adopt CSDM as well. Unlike your situation, our CMDB is not what I would describe as in a "mature" state right now so we are taking this opportunity during phase one Now implementation to build the CMDB foundation (Discovery and third-party integrations for automated CMDB build/maintenance with Service Mapping to establish the baseline Business, Technical, and Application services) with an eye towards full CSDM achievement in future phases. Given the number of related processes (CMDB, Discovery, Service Mapping, third-party integrations, Service Portfolio Management, Service Catalog Management, Service Level Management, etc.), I believe this will take our organization multiple phases to complete. I wish you luck on your journey and I firmly believe that your organization is on the right track.

[SNFan · Accepted solution]

I would say that you should consider CSDM from the beginning. As you migrate into SN CMDB, you should migrate your data over to the CSDM format. However, you don't need to populate all the data suggested by CSDM. So where you have data, put it where CSDM suggests. If you dont have the data, then it remains unpopulated at this time.

[James Turner]

Thanks SNFan.

That was the approach where we were leaning towards.  With a reasonably mature CMDB at present we have we have started to map some of the items like Business Capabilities in different ways in our existing tools and we didn't want to lose this. 

Taking the approach of deploying into the CSDM structure / model, using our existing data, but not having to populare across the model will make our MVP easier to achieve without losing the benefits as we build on our MVP foundation into the future.