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?

[John Spirko]

If there are any changes it won't be until knowledge 25 when they're supposed release CSDM 5.  You won't see anything documented before than.

[Johannes]

However, there are some changes implemented already in the technology domain which one should be aware of: "Technical Service" has changed to "Technology Management Service" and "Application Service" has changed to "Service Instance".
This is documented here: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/yokohama-servicenow-platform/page/product/csdm-implementation...
The changes are automatically implemented when upgrading to Xanadu, changing the label and service classification of "cmdb_ci_service_technical" to "Technology Management Service" and the label of "cmdb_ci_service_auto" to "Service Instance".

Comment: These changes are present in our Yokohama Release Testing Preview (RTP) version.

[Miklos Palfi]

I wish there would be more consistency again in the model. Refactoring the objects is a very good thing, but it should be done in a consistent way. Technology Management Services are using now Technical Service Offerings, which are in the service_offering mixed with the business offerings only differenciated by the service classification attribute.

It would be great to have all offerings in a cmdb_ci_offering table, below which in cmdb_ci_offering_technology and cmdb_ci_offering_business would clearly separate the two domains, like it is already done one level higher on the service layer.

[John Spirko]

This is a good paper too: https://pubs.opengroup.org/it4it/whitepapers/shift_to_digital.html 

[Houchen]

Interesting conversation.

In terms of 'Business Application' - I see this as a Design time entity, providing a viewpoint on business applications. It allows Enterprise Architects for example, to like analyse and heatmap the enterprises portfolio of applications. Enabling strategic planning and decisions to be made, taking account of complexity and other factors.

I don't link Customers to Business Applications, rather they link to Application Services (Systems) and system components e.g. Consumable APIs.

In terms of viewing the 'Digital Product' world, I've found the Digital Product Workbench to be a useful way to visualise what ServiceNow is providing as a Digital Products structure/alignment.