How to represent "Product" in CMDB? The closest is Application Service in my opinion.

[Peter Kindbom]

Any other suggestions or experience? Any good guess on news in Utha and Vancouver concerning Product Mangement? I have got some hint saying that Product Owner will replece Service Owner as the "central role" in CSDM. Feedback on this is apreciated.

Keep up the good work 🙂

[Stig Brandt]

You got "product owner" on the application model, maybe consider this!

[Alec Hanson]

Hi @Peter Kindbom,

I think it might help understanding where you are coming from. I see two potential 'product' views in ServiceNow:

1. A product (or service) that the customer sells to an end user

2. A product that you the customer uses from another company - or you created internally

@Stig Brandt interestingly you say there is "product owner" on the application model, but 'Owner' is available on all models, so it depends what 'Product' is being referred to.

It might help looking at https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-servicenow-platform/page/product/csdm-implementation/concep... , all 'Product' Models have a 'Product' Owner.

So the Products you use from others tend to be in the Hardware Model, Software Model etc. These product owners might be internal users who have agreed the use of specific products, e.g. the internal IT Director may have agreed the use of Apple Pro 14" and 16" and HP Elitebook 840 15" and 17" are the only laptops used within an org.

Products that you as a customer sell I believe should be Business Services - indeed in a CSM scenario the variants you support (i.e. Service Offerings) should have a Model that is the Product Model that you sell to Customers, which then become Sold Products that you have sold to a Customer.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Alec

[mary_lindell]

Products are associated with Application Services, they are not the same. Application Services most closely align to the different installed instances of an application used to provide a Service. A Product is the tangible item that is either bought by the company or sold by the company to customers.

Think of it this way. You buy a product called ABCSoftware from a supplier. The ABCSoftware software is logically modeled in Application Portfolio Management as a Business Application, which is associated with a Product called ABCSoftware. The application is installed 4 different places. 2 development instances, 1 QA/Test instance, and 1 Prod instance. Each installation becomes an application service, each identified as dev, test, and prod. Each instance may have different service owners, support groups, etc. All are associated with the Product ABCSoftware and the Business Application. The Product is associated with a Product Owner, and the Business Application is associated with several stakeholders, like Technical Architecture teams, consuming business units, processes that they support,  and Portfolios with their associated portfolio owners.

I hope this helps to add some clarity.

[mcastoe]

Hi,

To add to Mary's advice here and also show you where ServiceNow thinking is headed, the Model Id, a reference to Application Model, has been added to the default Business Application form in APM as of San Diego.  Application Model is what is used as the "Product" in SPM Agile and SAFe as well as APM.