Status Concept/State Model for Business Services and Service Offerings

Steven Torok · ‎08-04-2020

Hello everyone!

do Business Services and Service Offerings have a default/OOB State Model which is configured?

Just to be sure my questions is clear: a business service might have the following lifecycle: Planned, In Progress, Active, Retired

- What basic concept is OOB?

- How can such a basic concept be adapted for specific needs?

Many thanks in advance for your support.

Regards,

Steve

David Thigpen · ‎08-05-2020

Hi Steve - great question.

There is a defined phase and status model on the service and offering records. The two fields are used together to describe where the service is in its lifecycle. Status is dependent on parent phase.

Phases are

Pipeline - where new service/offerings are being considered and approved

Catalog - where services/offerings are being designed, developed, and deployed

Retired - services that are now longer being provided

Within each phase are statuses:

Phase: Pipeline
- Status: Requirements, definition, analysis, approved, chartered
Phase: Catalog:
- Status: Design, development, build/test/release, operational, retiring
Phase Retired:
- Status: Retired, obsolete

Only services that are Catalog-Operational and assigned to a portfolio are visible in the Service Owner Workspace.

Other considerations:

A service must have its parent node within a portfolio defined before it can be placed in the Catalog phase.
A service must also have at least one defined offering to be placed in the Catalog phase. The offering does not have to be in an operational state.

Thank you,

David

View solution in original post

Steven Torok · ‎08-27-2020

Greetings David!

Above you clearly described the OOB Phase/Status concept with ServiceNow, now I have an additional questions which follow this thread....

How does ServiceNow handle Statuses when an existing service/service offering are updated?

For example:

- A service has the status "Operational", then some attributes are updated.

- does the status then change?

- is a version incremented?

Thanks!

Regards,

Steve

David Thigpen · ‎08-27-2020

Hi Steve - we don't do any automatic status updates like you describe. However, such lifecycle management (workflow) has been a long time goal of ours. Also, we want versioning in a big way. Maybe we could contact you for your perspective on these?

David

Steven Torok · ‎09-03-2020

Hi David,

I would be happy to give my perspective on this topic, starting with the following case:

Services at my current client need to be approved (when initially set-up or updated)
Service X is Catalog:Operational (implying it has been approved)
A change is made to Service X
This change cannot be made effective to Service X until it is approved

In terms of versioning, I would expect:

When initially set-up and approved, Service X would automatically have a version associated to it: 1.0
Once it is updated and approved, Service X would have the latest version: 1.1

In general, such a version control/history view are important as my current client is in the pharmaceutical industry, with some regulation requirements which would call for such functionality.

How might this be managed within ServiceNow? Is there a change control mechanism which can manage that?

Thanks!

Regards,

Steve

Harika Bhupathi · ‎01-11-2022

@David Thigpen , @Jacques Clement - I'm exploring on service owner workspace and found that services created under technical service/business service child tables are not visible in Service owner workspace. But parent services created in cmdb_ci_service table are visible in Service owner workspace. If you faced this issue or know the solution how to show even child services in workspace..please help me

BR,

Harika

Jacques Clement · ‎11-04-2021

Great topic!

What I understand from the thread is that a services state is best modelled via the Phase (portfolio_status) and Status (service_status) attributes.

I have two follow-up questions:

Does this mean install_status and operational_status should simply be ignored for services?
What about Service Offering? I would be tempted to use Phase and Service Status too. What is a good practice for Service Offering?

Looking forward to hearing your opinion on that.

Best.