Registering Third Party Service Providers and Services in CSDM

[Andy H]

I have a business requirement to register third party services in our instance of ServiceNow and have a few thoughts on how to do this but wanted to see if anybody had any better ideas.

The data (Supplier/Supplier Service) already exists I just want to load the data into SN so that we can then relate these to our existing Technical Service Offerings i.e. Technical Service Offering A is dependent on Supplier Service Offering Z.

Example: ServiceNow Discovery Technical Service Offering is dependent on ServiceNow Discovery Supplier Service Offering

Has anybody done anything similar or have any suggestions on how best to do this?

[Andy H]

Thank you Kilo, makes sense however I am not sure it would meet the needs for all scenarios

For example, where we have a technical service offering that is dependant on a public cloud provider or a Service that includes a SaaS Business Application (with internal infrastructure also included). We would want to show a dependency of the service on the supplier without having to navigate through the CI's and Assets registered to identify that dependency. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

If the outcome of the service is a different outcome then yes, you can have dependencies between them.  In your example there was an internally provided Discovery service and a vendor provided Discovery service and that is what I was speaking to.  However, even in this latter example I would still suggest that you don't need to define a special class of Service Offering for "Supplier Service Offering".  A service is something that you manage as a service.  If you don't manage it as a service, then don't define it as a service.  Just because you have a SaaS Business Application that you use to provide a service, that doesn't mean you need a separate service to wrap around the Business Application.  Rather, you can create an Application Service representing your Production instance of your SaaS application (even if it only has a manual entry point or is an empty service due to a lack of discoverable assets), and that will fall nicely into the CSDM.  And if you do decide that you need a separate service for the supplier service, then I would still suggest you just define it under the appropriate parent service, and classify it as a technical service, with the appropriate Vendor specified.  I don't see a good argument here for classifying the service differently, in my opinion.

[Stuart Tucker]

We are looking at using Service Models for third party services, rather than Technical Service Offerings. The Service Model would be a reference field from the Application Service and contain information about the third party, contact details, support times, special comments, for use during an Incident or Change.

We see this as different to Technical Service Offerings which are reserved for internal technical services only.

[Barry Kant]

hi Stuart, 
I don't agree with the statement that Technical Service Offerings are only for Internal Technical Services. It represents the operational model (internal as well as external). 
See alse the response from CSDM Whisperer if you fill in the vendor reference it is filled with a external company it is a provider service (supporting your IT solitions). The commitments on those offerings are the agreements you made with the provider. 
BR,
Barry

[CMDB Whisperer]

Agreed.  Also is an "internal" service one that is consumed internally or provided internally?  Generally when we're asking this question, it's about the consumer, not the provider, but it can vary based on perspective and context.  For this and other reasons we should not conflate the internal/external attribute with the technical/business service classification attribute.  One does not depend on the other, even though they may seem strongly correlated.