Do we need to have parent service to a service offering?

[pratiksha5]

We are working on migrating the service offerings. (custom to oob). They are not having any BS/TS/AS linked. They have portfolio linked to SO. If I check instance I get confuse with how SO is in CSDM different than SPM (The other view of service offering). In SPM view the parent is mandatory and in default it is not. Please suggest the best practices around it. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

Easiest answer here is that an offering is implicitly an offering of something.  That something is a service.  Period.  What are you offering me?  A cookie?  A job?  No, you're offering me a service.  The Parent field tells me what Service you are offering me.  The Service represents the valuable outcome that is being delivered to the consumer.  The offering represents how that service is being delivered (in what location, using what technology, with what service agreements, etc.)  You cannot have a Service without an Offering because the Service alone does not provide information about how it is delivered.  You cannot have an Offering without a Service because the Offering alone does not describe what valuable outcomes are delivered.  You can't have the how without the what, or the what without the how.  They go hand in hand.  A Service therefore must have at least one Offering, and all Offerings must have a Service.  That goes for all platform configurations, SPM enabled or otherwise.  Assuming you care about CSDM, which if you are in this forum is a safe assumption.  Whether and when the fields themselves are considered mandatory is not really the issue.  To get real value out of Service Management capabilities in the platform you need to follow CSDM which prescribes that services are composed of the Service and its Offerings.

[pratiksha5]

Hi @CMDB Whisperer,

I totally agree with you. If I build CSDM from scratch I will follow the same approach. However, in this case, it was built before all of these were introduced by ServiceNow and now we are helping them in migrating. I want to keep the OOB features and follow the guidelines so that we can leverage the system's capabilities. Thank you for the response. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

Yes, so you will need to determine what are the parent services as part of the migration.  It may not be as simple as changing the CI classes, because the existing CIs just may not be broken down in the right way.  So this is likely going to involve a combination of reclassifying, adding, and possibly removing CIs to fit the model that is best practice according to CSDM.  But the bottom line is that you absolutely need to have a Parent service for every offering.  That is not something that is questionable in my opinion.