Technical Services/Business Services in Incident management

[Kristoffer Pari]

Hi,

i have a case where ServiceNow is used purely for managing a Company internal Application needs. 

Users who report e.g. incidents are internal users or vendors. 

We would like to use service offering in some cases for users to choose when reporting incidents. 

Now the question is, should i use Technical Service offerings or Business Service offerings?

From different materials i have read, i get the understanding that Business Service Offerings are used mainly when you have a service that a company Sells and should only show the Business Impact for a incident? Are there any reason why a Business Service Offering  would be created for a internal Application if it is not related to any sold/provided customer faced service, and populated to the Service offering field on a incident?

Regards,
Kristoffer

[CasperJT]

Hi Kristoffer,

I think you should see the sell/consume domain (business service portfolio, service and offering) as something offered to customers. In ITIL a customer is not necessarily an external entity, but can also be internal.

As an example Finance could be a business service portfolio or business service depending on the size of an organization and the need for granularity. So if you are managing an internal Finance service of some kind it would still be a business service. Your customers are just internal rather than external.

I think you will find this documentation useful as well: Common Service Data Model product view: Incident Management | ServiceNow Docs

I also recall that one of the white papers suggested the most natural starting point for an incident creation would be the application service, since this is the most obvious thing to the user 'I am not able to login to ServiceNow - Prod' or similar. Often end users reporting an incident will may not understand the hierarchy of services and just know what they are logging in to.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Casper

[Kristoffer Pari]

Hi Casper, and thank you for your answer. I think you are correct for the Incident use case. 

I think the issue for me is that i'm having a hard time understanding where Business service is then needed when we talk internal customers. 

If end user reports incidents based on Application Services and are records they understand. What is then the use case for Business service?

Br,

Kristoffer

[CasperJT]

Hi Kristoffer,

To address why you would want to add offerings and services. I think you should see this as at least two parts.

1. Grouping / categorizing things just makes them easier to have an overview
• What Applications Services provide what business functionality
• When a supporter closes a ticket they are able to provide more detail by have more categorization options
2. Selling a service does not require the name of a specific product
• When looking for a new service you are focusing on what you need rather than the particalur products that can deliver these

Of course nothing is black ad white, but in general I still think the actual end users who are often the ones reporting issues/incidents will not necessarily understand the hierarchies that we need to deliver their services.

Br.

Casper

[Christian Prob2]

Hi @Kristoffer Parikka ,

as a super-simple starting point / rule-of-thumb I usually say that anything that is offered to outside IT should be a business service. As mentioned by @CasperJT it should not matter if the customer is 'internal' or 'external'. 

You will end up with issues where services are sub-services that support true business services, but that may also be offered directly to the business. I have not yet looked into this in detail - it may result in having to add 'semi-artificial' business services in those cases.

Hope that helps a bit,

Christian

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