Process Mining and CSDM are both ServiceNow offerings and they go very well together. When you implement ServiceNow modules you have in-platform data in various tables, which when you mine using Process Mining reveals insights and patterns helpful for adopting CSDM. This article explains how to use Process Mining to speed up your CSDM journey.
Process Mining mines data to provide a visualised flow of work in your processes highlighting anomalies and bottlenecks along with detecting bad patterns to initiate ideas for process improvements. It also offers robust machine learning features that analyze root cause and unstructured data e.g. work notes, short description and much more.
CSDM is common service data model with standard set of terms and definitions used across all ServiceNow products. CSDM is doing CMDB right. The common services data model can act as a blueprint to map your IT services on the ServiceNow platform. It is a CMDB-based framework that outlines where to place data for the other products that are in use. CSDM is also a standard for ServiceNow products that use CMDB. If you follow the CSDM framework, you’ll ensure that the data in the application maps to the correct CMDB table which minimises duplicate, incorrect, and out-of-date data. It provides visibility into application and service data from varying domains, consolidating everything into a single view. This gives your organisation the opportunity to align your IT and company strategies. CMDB with a high-quality CSDM provides multiple benefits like faster incident resolutions, better security, and better judgment of the impact of change.
For CSDM adoption, point Process Mining to mine the correct dataset
- Focus on Service hierarchy in CMDB with the 3 main child services
- Technology Service (cmdb_ci_service_technical)
- Business Service (cmdb_ci_service_business)
- Service Instance (cmdb_ci_service_auto): formerly called ‘application service’
- Mine operations data alongside Service
You must mine IT operations data that comes in from Incident, Problem and Change alongside the CMDB data to provide a relationship of operational impact and evidence of improvement on KPIs. The data fields to focus on from the operational tables are CI, Service, Service Offering and Assignment Group.
How Process Mining speeds up CSDM adoption
- Use Process Mining to highlight negative impact on KPIs & process pain points that CSDM irons out
It is often challenging to encourage business stakeholders to prioritise CSDM adoption. Process Mining helps expose bad behaviours in IT processes and its impact on KPIs which helps document the business case for CSDM implementation.
The visual above from Process Mining the incident table reveals CI (configuration item) field is updated on Incidents multiple times or left blank, and it takes a long time to get to the correct CI and tickets ping pong back and forth or multi-hop across various groups until the root cause analysis is concluded. Most times, the ticket is routed back to the service desk looking for the correct owner group. During this time, incidents are put on hold or are in progress impacting their average resolution times. This is where the use of service model (CSDM) instead would help save time to resolution.
*Table used: Configuration Item
In the visual above, CI table is mined revealing that ‘updated by’ field is changed multiple times. This typically occurs when CIs that are auto updated through discovery are manually updated by users bypassing the expected process and making it vulnerable to data inaccuracies. You can isolate which CI classes show the bad behaviours through the breakdown filters.
Process Mining also exposes bad patterns such as ‘Rework’ and ‘Ping Pong’ (displayed below) where lifecycle status of CIs has been updated multiple times from ‘retired’ to ‘in use’.
- Visualize the progression on CSDM journey (crawl, walk, run & fly) using Process Mining
CSDM best practice recommends its gradual adoption by first sorting out the foundation data and then building main elements such as ‘business application’ and ‘service instance’, followed by establishing technical ownership of services and lastly bringing in business service ownership and its catalog items.
Process Mining can be used at every step of this journey as shown below to visualise the service model with parent Service, and its children (service instance, technical and business) gradually built around it. It also helps dissect data through breakdowns for business criticality, support group and service classification and helps spotting anomalies for their quick resolution.
- Use ‘Compare’ feature in Process Mining for before and after CSDM adoption analysis & its positive impact on:
- Incident (for mean time to resolve)
- Change (for impact analysis)
- Problem (for root cause analysis)
- Service catalog & Request (for user self-serve on relevant services)
- SLA breach analysis
The visuals below show the results of before and after CSDM where incidents are not ‘awaiting caller’ after CSDM adoption. It also summarises the metrics showing reduction in durations and deviation after CSDM adoption. This is a strong evidence of the value of CSDM portrayed through Process Mining.
Full video recording to academy session is here.
