How to better gather data from service owners to build Technical/Business services

[Ravish Shetty]

Hi all,

We are starting our CSDM journey with CSDM 4 and we do not have discovery or service mapping enabled at the moment.

We will start sessions with different Technolgy and Business owners to understand what services they provide, if they have an existing catalog that they use, what are their SLA, etc so that we could create Technical Services, Technical Service offerings, Business Service, Business Service Offerings, Service Instance, Business application, support groups involved, SLA, Availability commitment, etc.  in the CMDB.

Thanks,

Ravish

[Ravish Shetty]

Bump

[Cassandra Kittl]

In your shoes, I would start with looking at the history of Incidents and requests received over the past year. Look for theme/trends. Does the history show incidents/requests for reporting, new equipment, port setup etc. Make sure the focus is for the group you are interviewing and set up workshops to discuss the user journey work flows - what are the touch points, and when does support engage? What does the back office team and how is the ticket handled? This may seem a little more in depth than you expected - but the end result is the workshop defines the service and the service offerings (regardless of technical/business).

Please let me know if this was helpful by marking it as helpful.

[Cassandra Kittl]

One more tip: Update the service information in stages: First stage is for the bare minimum/required fields. Next step is to capture one more layer, and so on. The reason for doing it in stages is multiple:

• Account for decommissioning of services entering the end of their lifecycle at the time of the information gathering.
• Learning curve of how to set the services and service offerings up.
• Providing the ability to pivot before investing a lot of information into the definition.

[Barry Kant]

I would not hope that you realize what the IT organization is doing by analysis the incident history. I hope they have an org structure in place that knows what they do. Clearly there are no SLAs today (which is not a problem), but I am sure there is an operational model (IT teams) that operate the IT. If you map that against eg a TBM structure then you have a pretty nice starting point for the technical service portfolio. 
The distinctive offering level might be more granular when SLAs will be needed. 

The business side is different. If those are not defined, maybe TBM will also help in a high level way:
Employee Services
Shared Services
Business (Sold) Services

Same story, if there are no SLAs defined then the business offerings might be lean (PROD vs non-prod? or maybe only PROD solutions are managed).
Try to get the right stakeholders at the table. Who is interested in the Business side, who needs to be interested on the IT side?
My advise: do not make it a only-IT topic, that will likely not be successful in the company adoption overal.

BR,
Barry