Business Services and CI's - Incident Logical vs. Functional/Physical Organization

[tellmeastory]

I apologize in advance if I am misunderstanding the fundamental structures of the product. It has been presented to me that the category = business service, and sub category & ci would be sub items of such throughout the system.

We are starting green field with a new instance of ServiceNow and I am curious about organization for Business Services and their related CI's. I have some familiarity with ServiceNow from another company, unfortunately the instance was very locked down and highly customized so I am not quite sure what the real OOB capabilities were in the system. From a practical view our service desk is capable of categorizing Business Services and affected CI's based on their logical grouping. For example:

Logical Business Services

• Network,
• Hardware
• Software
• etc.

One could also group business services by the functional / physical group that owns that owns them. Our consultant has strongly suggested eliminating the logical view and replacing it with the actual company hierarchy. Unfortunately due to the way our company is structured based on business needs, it would be near impossible for our Service Desk or our customers calling in to have any idea who manages a given CI, see below:

Functional View of Business Services

• Server Infrastructure Services
• IT Operations Services
• Software Distribution Services
• Vendor Application Services
• etc.

While both are accurate classifications, each has its pro's and cons. So I am curious how to reconcile this. Does ServiceNow offer only an either / or classification of Business Services and CI's? Or in other terms, can i present a Logical view of incidents to the people creating tickets in the system and simultaneously add the classifications of business services in some means to identify the owner accurately for full ITIL compliance?

I am also curious about what else would be affected by this or if it was a non-issue, specifically for the Service Catalog which will have a similar challenge. Our customers would require us to provide a Logical view of services as opposed to a functional/physical view.

[sethivarun]

Hi Dave,

Category is not always equal to business service.

Business services are classified into three categories

1) Real Business Services ex: email, payroll processing etc. these are the highest level business services and are a combination of various services, CI's , hardware etc.

2) Technical Services :   These are logical grouping of the services that are present internally in the company. Like Database services would comprise of all the databases, etc.

3) application services: these are services that can be used to determine the architecture of your applications region.

what I would suggest is to provide these three columns on the incident form.

1) Business Service -   reference to business service table and filter as service classification as business service

2) Technical Service - reference to business service table and filter as service classification as technical service (icategory and subcategory can be autopopulated using the data from this record)

3) Configuration Item reference to cmdb_ci which would contain all the CI's except the ones mentioned above so that there is no duplication.

[sethivarun]

Grouping by Technical Service will give you the logical view and grouping by Business service will give you business view.