Using CSM for internal processes (and with internal users)

[Hans Peter]

Hi,

I have a bit of a problem. I'm consulting (and implementing) at a customer who just got ServiceNow. There's another consultant of a different company in the project, who has much more experience than me.

This consultant suggested that the customer should use CSM to easily separate internal processes, by utilizing case types. Basically, there'd be a case type for purchasing, another case type for HR, and so on. This is of course done to save costs of purchasing the respective ServiceNow modules, while still being able to somewhat separate the data (which could contain sensitive information, in the case of HR, for example) from the rest.

I have a very bad feeling with this. First, ServiceNow preaches that CSM is a module that deals with external customers, not internal employees. If you take out of the box CSM, you'd need to give internal employees the customer role to be able to open cases, which won't be possible, because customers inherit snc_external, which will clash with the snc_internal they might have inherited from other roles.

Secondly, I have seen similar approaches go wrong for other companies, where they had to invest a lot of work to basically roll everything back and migrate the processes off of cases.

There are a lot of places that check the type of user in CSM (if it's a contact, for example), and I'm pretty afraid that the suggested approach will take a lot of customizing effort, either on the CSM side, or on the ITSM side - because after all, I'll be the one implementing this.

I guess my question is this: Is my gut feeling correct on this, or would you say that using CSM in the way suggested by the other consultant is a valid approach? Not to dive off into company politics, but if I were to "fight" this suggestion, I'd ideally do it with a very valid reason.

[ersureshbe]

Hi, ServiceNow provides the functionality the external user should use Case - ie., part of CSM

If internal issues persist and you should use ITSM - ie., incident, problem and changes. But remember depends the business case requires support from internal IT employees the time case should be converted as ITSM tickets.

So, First understand the business and it covers external and internal customers you should advise procuring CSM and ITSM. Only CSM highlight you cant get the help from internal IT employees else the agent is a skilled person to manage with out referring the service operation team input

[Hans Peter]

Hi Suresh,

Sorry, I didn't provide the whole picture. The customer is, of course, also using the standard ITSM processes. The problem is just that if you want to use ServiceNow as an Enterprise Serivce Management Platform, you'll also have to deal with data ("tickets") that is internal to the organization, but doesn't really fit into the ITSM process.

An example would be HR. Of course, you could create a Catalog Item and name it "HR Request", but that'll mean that by default, everyone with the itil role can see all HR requests. Same with the purchasing usecase.

For that reason, the other consultant suggested to use CSM cases for HR and purchasing. Those cases will still be used by internal employees, not by external customers.

[leeneumann]

See if this article helps you Contributor users.  Down in the article it describes the use of the Internal User field and when the Account, Consumer, and Requesting Service Organization fields are blank but the Internal User field is populated, the Case is for an employee.

There are even OOB Email Notifications based off this field being populated. 'Case commented for Internal Contact' for example.