Technical Service Offering relationship with Application Service

[Sandra Clendon]

When modelling the ServiceNow platform, we have come across a scenario that we're not sure how to resolve.  We have situations where we believe Technical Service Offerings "depend" on Application Services (that are "contained by" other Technical Service Offerings).

Examples are:

TSO: "ITOM Administration" contains App. Serv. "Certificate Management DEV", "Certificate Management TEST" and "Certificate Management PROD"

TSO: "PKI Management" depends on App Serv. "Certificate Management PROD"

or

TSO: "ITSM Administration" contains App. Serv. "Change Management DEV".... etc

TSO: "ITIL Change Management" depends on App. Serv. "Change Management PROD"

While we can create these "depends on" relationships, they are not supported by any of the OOTB service builder options and do not show up in DPM.  They do all support the recommended Business Service Offering "depends on" relationship with Application Services.

Am I missing something here in our design?  PKI Management and ITIL Change Management are clearly Technical Service Offerings, but it's our ServiceNow platform team that owns, roadmaps, enhances and maintains these products (also Technical Services).

[CasperJT]

Hi Sandra,

I would argue that technical services focus on managing application services and infrastructure, whereas busiess services focus on the consumption of these services.

So for the TSO PKI management I would assume that the purpose is to manage certificates on behalf of other technical services and is offered to technical personnel.

For ITIL Change Management, I would argue that this fits better within a Business Service called "IT Service Management" and consumes the ServiceNow platform because the focus is not to maintain the Application Service, but to consume a function of it.

Some material that might be worth reviewing, if you haven't already.

CSDM Discussion: Technical Service vs. Business Service - YouTube

CSDM Example Series: Platforms - YouTube

CSDM Example Series: Shared Tech and Client Compute services - YouTube

Hope this is useful.

//Casper

[Juan Osorio]

bingo

[Kristine Naess · Accepted solution]

Hi Sandra and Casper,

We have chosen to divide services between cmdb_ci_service_technical and cdmb_ci_service_business according to this TBM mapping:

So if there's a business consumer (not IT tech person) to the offering, it's a business offering. Otherwise it's a tech offering. And even if the data model suggests a different relationship as default for tech offerings to application services, we have used the same. And in a Data Foundations PAC meeting in K23, Scott Lemm/Mark Bodman told they were going to open up for more "bespoke" relationship types in the future. 

This also allows a business offering (using an business user facing application) to be dependant on a tech offering (using a tech user facing application) that again is dependant on an application service to function, which can be helpful when you want to see who may be impacted by an outage. 

Regards,

Kristine

[Sandra Clendon]

Thanks Kristine.  We have taken the same approach - business consumer -> business service, tech consumer -> tech service.  For our PKI Management Tech Offering (clearly a Tech Offering), I have now made it dependent on the ITOM Administration Tech Offering which can be done OOTB in Service Builder.  It's a work around, but I don't want to create relationships that aren't recommended (even though I can) - especially when we are doing our foundational work.