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.

[steveellis]

Employee self-service should use the Employee Center portal (not customer portal nor service portal), even if the workflows are built in the CSM Case Management application.