Parent/Child Service Offerings?

[CMDB Whisperer]

I understand that the parent field on Service Offering should be filled in with the Technical or Business Service according to CSDM, and that Business Services themselves should not reference other Business Services as a parent.  However, there may be a case to be made for Service Offerings having child Offerings.  The use case is for an IT department which is globally distributed, which has a global owner for a given primary offering, but has regional owners for the regional offerings.  Each offering can be owned separately, can have different relationships to different app services or dynamic CI groups for each region, and different Subscriptions and Catalog relationships specific to the region, but ultimately all roll up to a single Service Offering.  Should this model be used for that scenario, and if not how would you define this?  I could see just defining adjacent Service Offerings at the same level and having the Technical Service be the point of rollup, but that presumes a level of granularity that might be more specific than you really want to define at that level.

[Barry Kant]

I never considered a parent/child services construct other then creating depends on relations on service offerings (which in a way is the same). Normally from Business Offerings depending on Technical Offerings. There is no ootb logic to make use of that to my knowledge. 

Flatter structures can work ok. Will be seen as overhead but then you need to weight pros and cons. eg you can have alarming services (across a country) that includes 1000 antennas. That seems a huge overhead in administration, but it is in the end a significant service that needs to be managed/communicated on. That doesn't necessarily is the same for all services.

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

@scott_lemm has posted a more definitive answer to the original post here, so I am going to mark this one Solved, although there is still some potential for further discussion on the best way to address the use case of globally owned and regionally managed offerings that share a common taxonomy.

[Community Alums]

Pardon my ignorance, what are TBM ? 

[CMDB Whisperer]

It stands for Technology Business Management.  It is basically a standard capability model that is used to provide different taxonomies for how technology is managed in a business.  It has been growing in popularity over the last several years, and it is a good (though not the only) way to categorize your IT service portfolios.  You can find out more here: TBM Council Web Site

[Community Alums]

Thanks for the info Paul.