Service Instance and Service Offering

[tonyacollins-sm]

Does Service Instance flow into Service Offerings.

[Kieran Anson]

A service instance is used by a business service offering. It is also contained by a technology management service offering g

[tonyacollins-sm]

Do I need a Service Offering.  Can I have a healthy CMDB without it.

[Mathew Hillyard]

HI @tonyacollins-sm 

In your example above I would change it as follows:

Service: Office Productivity (drop the apps)

Service offering: Microsoft 365

A Service Offering can connect to one to many Service Instances.

To answer your question: no. Every service in your business and technology portfolios should contain at least one service offering. The offering is the thing users request access to or raise incidents about. What usually happens (as you have found) is that the service objects have been defined at too high a level.

For example "Network Services" is a common name for a Technology Management Service but it's describing a range of services so should be a Service Portfolio Taxonomy Layer instead.

This is why I advise people to ignore the fact that CSDM has Portfolio in the Fly stage. Build it out from the start, then once you have the taxonomy layers you have the buckets in which to put related services, and the services are described the right level.

This post might help: https://www.servicenow.com/community/common-service-data-model/the-art-of-structured-services-and-se...

I hope this helps!

Mat

[DonnaOlsen]

Short answer: you can technically have a CMDB without Service Offerings, but it's not really

Here's a diagram as one valid CSDM example. An alternative worth considering: model Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook as their own Business Applications, each referencing Microsoft 365 as their Platform Host.