Digital Products - replace or complement apps and services?

[Miklos Palfi]

Currently we are working on introducing the digital products concept into our data model. There are some very valuable contents out there on the topic including the recent Digital Services Forum meeting Digital Product Management & Foundational Data - Recorded April 11th 2024 

Our main question is the change from services and applications to digital products.

IT4IT v2.1, ITIL4 and TBM - in our opinion - all build heavily on the service portfolio and hierarchy. IT4IT v3.0 tries to make a step in the agile / DevOps direction (and comes with that closer to DevOps / SAFe world) by replacing the services and applications with products. (This was also well discussed in a previous Digital Services Forum session: 

IT Operating Models of Tomorrow - Presented on May 23 2022 

But how can we keep compatibility to the current models and frameworks? Shouldn't we keep the services and applications layer (not only the offers/service offerings) as a second view? What about putting the services and applications under the products as child-objects/tables? Actually we also sync many of our applications into the service table, because that's what customers (and the business users) know and name for the servicedesk.

So the question is replace or complement apps and services with digital products in the data model?

[Miklos Palfi · Accepted solution]

The new CSDM v5.0 gives a good answer:
https://www.servicenow.com/community/cmdb-blog/the-beauty-of-clean-design-the-yokohama-release-bring...

[Miklos Palfi]

For our transition period from service-centric to product-centric model we have chosen a custom approach: under the business service class we have created a custom u_product class, with Product specific attributes. We have there Product Owner, Scrum Master, Solution Architect etc. instead of IT Service Owner and this class is used in relation to all things related to digital products (product backlog, ideation, request, feedback/satisfaction items and DevOps items.)
These product entries are available for Incident, Change, Problem (because it is a subclass of the business services) and the TBM required service categories are also available on them.

In reporting views you find the products and business services in the same columns enabling a phased transition (which takes at least 2-3 years in all countries of our organisation), but you can filter on class type also, keeping the products and services apart.