If you haven’t read Part 1, I highly recommend giving it a read, even if just to understand the characters below a bit better.
Introduction
Last time, we met Spider-Man, Goku, and even the Dodge – each standing in for different CIs. Now let’s see how those characters provide services in the CSDM world.
Mandatory Quick disclaimer (same as in my previous article): This is a light-hearted take on a topic that is, in reality, quite complex. It’s not a deep-dive or a step-by-step implementation guide. But it might just help spark a few lightbulb moments for customers - or anyone around you who isn’t yet fluent in ServiceNow.
Business Services: What does Spider-Man do in NY?
Spider-Man is, of course, a superhero, and what do superheroes do? They fight crime and save citizens! Spider-Man specifically operates within NYC, so he provides a service to the city’s citizens. As part of his crime fighting service, he knocks criminals down, webs them up, and takes them to the police station.
If we CSDM-ify this, “Crime Fighting” would be a Business Service, because the people he’s defending, his stakeholders, are the citizens of New York. The Business Offerings will be “Criminal Beatdown”, “Criminal Webbing” and “Criminal Police Delivery”, all of which fall under the “Crime Fighting” Service. However not all of Spidey’s activities involve criminals. The other part of being a superhero means he rescues people from fires, helps kittens stuck in trees, or even fetches stray balloons kids let go of. These are all Offerings within his other Service of “Civilian Saving”.
Both the Crime Fighting and Civilian Saving can also be grouped under his Portfolio of “NYC Safekeeping” (although we'll cover Portfolios another time).
In your organisation you’re (maybe) not fighting crime, but you are almost certainly giving your users a way for them to communicate with each other, share files, host online meetings, etc. and you do that by providing certain applications to them like MS Teams, Slack, OneDrive, SharePoint, Zoom, Outlook…
These all have something “in common” between them. For example, Slack and Outlook are both used for Communication, while OneDrive and SharePoint both provide File Management capabilities.
But how is this related to Spider-Man then? Let's have a look:
Portfolio | Service | Offering |
NYC Safekeeping | Crime Fighting | Criminal Beatdown |
NYC Safekeeping | Crime Fighting | Criminal Webbing |
NYC Safekeeping | Crime Fighting | Criminal Police Delivery |
NYC Safekeeping | Civilian Saving | Fire Rescue |
Communications | Corporate Communication | Teams |
Communications | Corporate Communication | Slack |
Communications | External Conferencing | Zoom |
Communications | Outlook | |
File Management | Personal File Management | OneDrive |
File Management | File Sharing | SharePoint |
Just like Spider-Man, in your organisation is providing certain Services in a variety of ways, aka Offerings.
You may also be wondering how does the Catalog fit into all of this, and why is it related to the Business Offerings?
How does Spider-Man know that there are citizens in need of help? Sure, he has super hearing but what if he’s in Staten Island and someone needs help all the way in the Bronx? Cue the amazing F.N.S.M. (Friendly Neighbour Spider-Man) app which lets everyone ask for help or report a crime is happening from the comfort of your phone!
Lost your cat? Had a truck stolen? All of it can be reported in the app and it will be tied to the appropriate Offering and Service.
Your organisation should have a similar Catalog for your Services and Products, allowing your users (or customers) to submit a variety of requests, like Access Requests, New App Subscriptions, Server allocation, etc. or even that something is wrong like “Outlook emails not sending”, “Password reset required for Slack”, etc.
Just like the FNSM app, these Requests and Incidents will be automatically associated to the appropriate applications, services and offerings affected, empowering your reporting capabilities.
| Issue | Service | Offering |
| My store was robbed! | Crime Fighting | Criminal Beatdown |
| Outlook emails not sending | Outlook | |
| New Mailbox | Outlook |
Technology Management Services: What does Spider-Man do at home?
We’ve discussed the public facing side of the webhead’s Services but there’s a lot of things he has to do in the background that citizens don’t see. Alongside the Spider-Man figure, I had the Spider-Lair, which contained a few gadgets, places for Spidey to hang out (literally and figuratively) and a garage for the Spider-Car.
While the Dodge Viper was his dream car, the Spider-Car was the one used to fight crime, which meant it often took a beating and required some upkeep in the garage. As a result, Spider-Man had a few internal maintenance services like “Car Maintenance”, which is self-explanatory and “Webbing Upkeep”, which he used to replace and improve his web cartridges. These are then the Technology Management Service and Technology Management Offering counterparts to the Business Services we saw before, which can also be linked to the Portfolios we saw before.
So in the same way that Spider-Man maintains and administers the tools he uses that allow him to provide his Business Services, your organisation most likely needs those same Technology Management Services and Offerings like “Application Management Services” which could contain Offerings like “Microsoft 365 Administration”, “Slack Administration”, etc.,
Portfolio | Service | Offering |
NYC Safekeeping | Webbing Upkeep | Webbing Restock |
NYC Safekeeping | Webbing Upkeep | Webbing Improvement |
NYC Safekeeping | Suit Upkeep | Suit Repair |
NYC Safekeeping | Car Maintenance | Tyre Repair |
NYC Safekeeping | Car Maintenance | Bodywork Improvement |
Communications & File Management | Application Management Services | M365 Administration |
Communications & File Management | Application Management Services | Slack Administration |
Which wraps up the Technology Management Services side of things:
But how does the Catalog work for TM Services then?
Well, citizens aren’t the only ones who can use the app! Spider-Man himself can use his own app to log requests, such as when a Fire Rescue is called, which sends an immediate warning to the Fire Department. The citizens, however, cannot ask for a Suit Repair (sadly).
Similarly, your IT and HR teams can both ask for something to be done on MS365, like setting up new Team Workspaces. However, let’s assume only IT can delete them, so HR won’t be able to request anything related to the M365 Administration TM Offering.
Who requests it | Offering | Offering Type |
Citizens | Fire Rescue | Business |
Spider-Man | Fire Rescue | Business |
Spider-Man | Suit Repair | Technology Management |
HR | OneDrive | Business |
IT | OneDrive | Business |
| IT | M365 Administration | Technology Management |
Even though it’s all part of the business’ Catalog, the consumers are different!
In sum, same Catalog, different consumers: citizens/HR see Business Offerings; Spider-Man/IT see Business and Technology Management Offerings.
Relationships: Simple until next time
Relationships will get a lot more interesting when we get to the next part where we cover Dynamic CI groups and Service Instances, but at this point they’re pretty simple:
- An Offering has one single Parent at any given time, while Services can have one or more Offerings.
- Offerings are displayed in the Catalogs, while Catalogs reference the Offerings.
FAQ
Before wrapping up Part 2 I want to hopefully help answering a few common questions.
How do I distinguish if something is a Business or Technology Management Service?
Easy answer is simply to “look for the consumer of said Service”. The last table we looked at should help. But let’s see another example:
- Your internal non-IT departments, such as HR or Legal, as well as your external customers will be making use of the Business Services and Offerings.
These might include simple requests for hardware or software, or anything about Network Connectivity like “Corporate WiFi” or “Guest WiFi”. - Your IT teams (fulfillers) will consume, just as seen above, the day-to-day ‘Corporate WiFi’ Business Offerings.
However, they will also need to request items like “New Firewall Rule”, which as you can easily guess, won’t be available to HR. This makes “Firewall Management” a Technology Management Offering, under the Technology Management (TM) Service of Network Connectivity Administration.
How do I know when to log something for a Business or TM Service?
Let’s look at a sequence of events that might help us understand when to use each one:
- An end user says they cannot access “Corporate WiFi”.
Anyone who’s worked Service Desk (or still gets calls to fix their printer from their parents – read part 1 if you didn’t get this joke) will know way too many times that the resolution to something is to switch off and on again.
As such, you don’t want your Senior Engineers to have a first look at this Incident. Your Service Desk or 1st Line Support would be more appropriate. In the end we’d have your HR Manager logging an Incident with, for example:
- Offering of ‘Corporate WiFi’
- Priority - 3 due to how critical the offering is but still only impacting one user
- Longer SLAs
- Assignment group: Support group of the ‘Corporate WiFi’ Business Offering – 1st Line Support
- 99 more end users complain about the same issue.
In that scenario, it’s most likely something a restart will fix. Rather than being an issue with the user’s installation or device, something is wrong with the network itself. In this case, a Major or P1 Incident is logged by the 1st Line Support with the following details:
- Offering of ‘Network Connectivity Administration’
- Priority - 1 Major Incident set as the parent of the other 100 Incidents
- Shorter SLAs
- Assignment group: Support group of the ‘Network Connectivity Administration’ Technology Management Offering – Network Engineering
The Major Incident requires more senior people who will have access to dashboards, monitoring tools, etc. that will provide a resolution/response to the Incident.
A good rule of thumb for the escalation path of Incident is:
End User issue -> Business Offering
Escalates to
Outage -> Technology Management Offering
As we saw earlier, this won’t always be the case, as you can make use of the TMO directly, but it’s a useful starting point.
How do I define my different Offerings?
I’ll answer that question with another question. What separates your different Offerings?
- Stakeholders
- Support groups
- Support levels e.g. entitlements, support hours, SLAs
- Service Owners
- SaaS vs on-premise offerings
Ask and discuss a combination of the above with your Service Owners, and you should be able to start defining your Services.
Conclusion
And that wraps up our Services part of this series. I apologise for the longer article, but there's so much to talk about I just couldn't wrap it up sooner. If you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to post it below or DM me on LinkedIn.
Next up, we’ll dig into Service Instances and Dynamic CI Groups (and maybe more), keeping the ELI5 energy rolling, so make sure to follow me on LinkedIn for the next drop!
#CSDM
