Hello again @markbodman @scott_lemm,

Thanks for good advices on this. I agree that parent-child-relationships between services is not a good idea. 

After having discussed this with several stakeholders the last three months, I have the following suggestion:

What if ServiceNow detaches the TBM taxonomy nodes from the service portfolio structure (table), so that we can maintain these as two different structures? This would remove our needs for having parent business services, and other remediations to be able to handle reporting in an understandable structure.

In the IRM module, the Risk Taxonomies are separate from the other structures such as the ones that link Authority Documents -> Citations -> Policies -> Control Objectives. So why shouldn’t this be possible in the SPM module as well?

If the TBM taxonomy could have a separate structure, the ways of reporting could be more user friendly for various stake holders:

For Business Continuity Management stakeholders, the organisation structure based (Responsibility Roll-up) reporting is the most crucial. This makes use of a service-to-department responsibility mapping. People and tech together. Contracts, SLAs and service mapping are crucial parts in this. In this case the risk managers and BCM stakeholders want to filter on departments to see the totality of each department’s achievements and readiness.

For day-to-day management of service life cycle activities, and for charge back to subscribers of those services, the Charge back structure would be the most useful. This shows cost related to delivering IT as a service to transfer pricing units.

Whereas for financial controlling and cost optimisation, the “cost archetype” (Bench mark Roll-up) structure is the best. This focuses on what similarities there are between what’s being delivered, and how well comparable companies are performing when delivering these.

Sometimes the levels in these structures match, but far from always. I have used dotted lines to suggest a mapping between services/service portfolio structure and the department structure to show that this is optional. In our case, the business/technical services often cross TBM taxonomy nodes on Category level, so there’s only a dotted line here.

In our case we charge back to both transfer pricing units that are separate legal entities (with their own records having unique DUNS numbers in the core_company table) and some the business units within the mother company.  Therefore we need to be able to report on tax and other figures on a company level as well as a business unit level.

All in all, we really need to do something about the too close relation between the TBM taxonomy structure and the Service portfolio structure. Today we have removed the nodes and follow up on our custom, though TBM inspired, portfolios. That’s the only level that matches our needs.

Is that a possible way going forward?

Regards,

Kristine