In a recent webinar (you can access the on demand recording here ), mike.malcangio and I discussed the barriers to service catalog success, and good practices, before looking at how service catalog technology is evolving.
There were a number of great questions — some we answered live, the others that we didn't have time to answer live were followed up (mostly by service catalog guru Mike) via email. Here are a selection of questions and answers that might be useful to a wider audience:
How do you report on service catalog items?
- There are the standard reporting options in the tool -- which allow you to pull some fairly robust operational reports about volumes of items, team performance, etc.
- The other capability that's part of the tool is Metric Definitions. This allows you to define something that you'd like to measure and then capture information about it when a particular event happens or on an interval: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Metric_Definition_Support
- We've added some enhancements to help out with this in Eureka and are hoping to add more in the future releases: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Reporting_on_Service_Catalog_Variables
Is ServiceNow looking at improving how service catalog "variables" are used? Making them available in Task views or used in email notifications?
These capabilities exist today:
- If you are trying to display Catalog variables on something other than sc_task - then this might help: https://community.servicenow.com/thread/162469
- There's even a plug-in on Share to put variables on other tables: https://share.servicenow.com/app.do#/detailV2/9acae88a2b4a21004a1e976be8da1541/overview
Variables in Email -- here's a good thread on Community about it:
https://community.servicenow.com/thread/145257
We've already enabled entitlement scripts in our catalog items in the Calgary release. When we upgrade to Fuji, what's the implication for all the previously configured entitlement scripts? Does work need to be re-done?
Note: this question was based on what Mike presented for the Fuji release — a reworked implementation of "Entitlements", now called "User Criteria" which provides a flexible policy-based approach to control who has visibility to Service Catalog items.
The plan is to support both methods for now and eventually phase out the older method.
Wouldn't it go beyond control if everyone is able to request their own catalog item? Do we have any best practice sharing on how this was effectively implemented in other organization?
Note: this question relates to ServiceNow Service Creator which offers the ability for line-of-business staff to create services in the service catalog.
There was a blog written on Service Creator at the Eureka launch: https://community.servicenow.com/community/learn/blog/2014/06/19/the-rise-of-the-citizen-developer-o... .
In terms of the question, there are controls in place, starting with being given access to the capabilities to create service catalog items in your own departmental section. We will need to speak to the product manager re any best practices we have seen.
There seems to be a conflict between Procure-To-Pay systems and the Service Catalog in terms of requests originating in one or the other. What is your advice on this and resolving this?
Great question -- you're right there could be tension depending on where the Service Catalog is positioned relative to other systems and processes within your organization. The Service Catalog is really more about the "can I have it" kind of approval and delivery vs. traditional procurement systems. In fact, if you look at how we've built out our Asset Management capabilities, the Procurement functions and other pieces live as a separate but complimentary process. You can pull from stock (or employ similar concepts) when someone requests something via the catalog -- but the actual replenishment of stock is happening in the Procurement process. You could do the same thing with external Purchasing systems as well.
The term "successful catalog" has been used several times. What defines that? Usage metrics?
It will depend on what your success criteria are based in your service catalog initiative objectives. For most companies it will be adoption level (%), customer satisfaction, service delivery improvements (and SLA achievement), and possibly cost savings.
What's an average count of services? I'd like to have an understanding of what's too much or too little.
There isn't really a right or wrong amount of services. I would say the average is around 500-600 catalog items, but I've seen catalogs with 20,000 catalog items and others with 10.
What's really important is that:
- Your breakout of services make sense for your customers and for the kind of reporting that you'd like to do
- You're reusing or building data driven workflows whenever possible.
It's one of the things that I really like about the Catalog Item Designer -- it's all powered by one completely data driven workflow on the backend.
How does ServiceNow facilitate the management of service catalog and the CIs/cost (financial)/performance (incidents) that go with the service?
This is where our Service Portfolio application comes in and helps to tie the Business Services, CIs, SLAs and other functionality together: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Service_Portfolio_Management
I would like to find out more about how the referenced company is using on-the-fly translations using Google Translate as we currently translate our catalog in 8 languages.
Mike put the questioner in touch with the customer and account rep. Reach out to Mike if you are also interested.
I like that you said a service consumer should not need to know who provides a service but is it a good idea to provide contact numbers for a particular service in the catalog?
It's always good to have a contact number if people are "stuck" with self-service. Personally I wouldn't have it at the catalog item level but at the service catalog/portal level. So CERN, who I used as an example, has a long list of contacts on their portal should questions need to be asked about services https://cern.service-now.com/service-portal/contacts.do . Having a link to service catalog/portal help (live or knowledge base) is also needed.
The level of customization of Service Catalog by your customers is impressive. Where would be a good starting point in ServiceNow to implement something to that effect?
The foundation really is the Service Catalog and a lot of the concepts we covered in the webinar. To get that custom look and feel, the next step is to leverage our CMS (Content Management System) technology:
CMS Overview: https://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Content_Management_Overview
Case Study: https://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Case_Study_-_Building_Our_Website_in_CMS
In the Fuji or future releases, will you change the way approvals work so the approval will not go to the person who is requesting if they are the approver?
There are no changes to the default behaviors regarding approvals planned for Fuji (or beyond) at this point.
This is a nice usability improvement though, so I'll add it to the backlog of things to consider as we look to revisit approvals at some point in the future.
This is something that you can setup in your environment -- you would just need to add a check to the workflow so that if requester is the same as the approver then it should go pull their supervisor, or something similar. In a previous life as a customer we did something similar and we also incorporated a check for that person's signature authority -- so if the cost of the item was less than "x" and they were of level "y" then it would just skip the approvals and proceed directly to fulfillment.
Do you have examples of forms from the customer websites that you showed? I would like to get some ideas from what their forms look like.
Great question -- honestly -- the majority of them are presenting the standard form interface for ServiceNow below the surface. We have some customers that have gone and altered the core CSS to the application to skin the forms they want but it's not something that we really recommend. We're looking to make enhancements to CMS, or the successor to CMS, that will allow for us to completely theme the experience.
I'd like more information on reporting on catalog variables after they have been entered
There are some great enhancements in Eureka and hopefully more on the way in the future releases to enable easier reporting on Service Catalog variables: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Reporting_on_Service_Catalog_Variables
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