Services and Offerings - What's the Difference?

[David Thigpen]

Hi, I’m David Thigpen and I’m the Product Manager for the IT Service Portfolio Management application and Service Owner Workspace. One of the most important components of those two products are “offerings.”  Frequently I’m asked:

• “What’s the difference between an IT service and a service offering?” and also
• “How do I know when I should to define a new offering?”

I’d like to answer those from the perspective of our products so you can better leverage your ServiceNow investment.

First, a little background

Services have probably been part of the CMDB structure from day 1 of ServiceNow. They end up being referenced in many ways and by many things. One data element of a service is the “Service Classification” field.  Historically this field included some odd values like “infrastructure,” “billable” and others. Notably, one of those odd values was “Service Offering.” My understanding is that originally there was no Offering table, so that “Service Offering” value was needed. (Note: We cleaned up that classification list in a recent release.)

Services vs. Offerings

But eventually a Service Offering table was added to the CMDB, inheriting from Service.  This layering gave a more useful structure.  A service is defined with respect to how it enables and is used by the business, that is, what outcomes, capabilities, or process does it support?  Then, child offerings can be defined that are particular variants of that service. You may see offerings like Gold, Silver and Bronze in the demo data as examples of service variants.  We think of services really as “containers” of offerings and we recommend   every service have at least one offering as good practice.

Offerings vs Offerings

But how do we know when to define and create a new offering instead of a new service record?  If what I’m dealing with has basically the same “enable and use” characteristics of an existing service, then it likely is just another variant of that service.  There are no rigid rules regarding when to define new offerings so realize that defining variation is where things become art not science.  Back to the Gold, Silver, Bronze variants mentioned above, what’s the difference between Gold and Bronze? 

In Service Owner Workspace, the offering is where performance and spend are calculated and recorded.  It certainly makes sense that a Gold offering would be expected to have premium characteristics like performance and support over Bronze, with a corresponding higher cost.

Here is a (not exhaustive) list of things that may justify creating a new offering variant of a service within ServiceNow, with some examples: 

Different geographies, Audience	AMS vs. EMEA Email offerings
Support commitments	Premium vs. Standard Desktop Support Executive vs. Others Desktop Support
Response and Resolution SLAs	Rapid response vs. Standard response commitments
Availability differences	High availability vs. Standard
Underlying infrastructure	One offering supported by MSSQL Another offering supported by Oracle
Cloud vs. Local	Gmail vs. internal managed Exchange infrastructure
Support model	Onsite support vs. Remote
Vendor	Zoom collaboration vs. Skype
Operations characteristics (speed, capacity, etc.)	Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 file storage

Notice how some things can overlap.  For example, different offerings based on support model may also reflect different support commitments.  And at the end of the day, the cost likely to be different for each offering of a service.

Final thoughts

The good thing is that if you feel you have incorrectly defined a service as an offering (or vice versa) you can usually move the data pretty easily.  I hope this provides clarity on the use of services and offerings in ServiceNow.