Modelling Infrastructure Services in a Business Service

[Rob Mollee]

I'm currently working on a design for a Customer where we provide several Infrastructure related Services, such as WAN, Firewall, Remote Access, etc.. All of these are in essence Technology Services and will be modelled as such, using a cmdb_service CI and the necessary Service Offerings, which in turn will have a 'Contains' relationship to the Component CI's.

However, we have agreed with our Customer a set of Commitments that span the entire set of Technical Services, so we would need to (also?) define these services as Application Services, I guess; So we would then have, for example the following Application Services: 

• Firewall Application Services
• WAN Application Services
• Remote Access Application Services

I'm struggling a bit with the term 'Application' here, as the nature of these services is typically Technology based, and there is not really one single application that is representing the entire stack related to an Application Service...

So how would I define a Business Service Offering, that can provide the desired result? In reality I would need to create a Business Service Offering, that 'depends on' a series of Technical Services, rather than Application Services...

Would this comply with CSDM, or are there any suggestions on how this can/should be modelled?

Would welcome any suggestion on this!

[Ed Laar1]

Hi Rob,

Based on your explanation I would suggest the following:

Make a separation between the Services supplies (as you are) and the Services consumer (your customer).

From Service supplier perspective the Platform and Platform services are Business Offerings/ Business Services. They should be registered accordingly following CSDM. The Platform is the Application Service with it's components (CI's) that provide the platform related to it. Also the way you provide/organised the Technical Services can be registered in the correct way. This registration should be done in your ServiceNow instance or your domain in your domain seperated instance.

From Customer perspective the Platform and Platform services are CI's with Technical Services around it. The Application CI itself 'runs on' the Platform CI and the stack is represented by the Application Service CI. This all should be registered in the customers service management / ServiceNow instance or in the Customers domain in 'your' ServiceNow instance.

To make the picture complete relations can be created between the Platform Application Service in 'your' domain and the Platform CI in the customers domain. For identification purposes I should suggest to have the customer recognition into the CI name.

Does this make any sense? Important is the difference in Providing a Service or Consuming a Service. The actual CSDM in my opinion does not incorporate this in full blown I think.

Wondering what you think about this idea's.

Cheers,

Ed