Question RE: setting up relationships beetween Business Services

[psenkow]

We are new to SN, and deciding the best way to enter CI Relationships between Business Services.   We have a Primary Business Service, with additional Business Services that are a part of the original service.   Can anyone suggest the best CI Relationship to use?   I was looking at using "member of" (Business Service is a member of Primary Business Service), but cannot find much to describe the benefits / detriments, since this is not one of the suggested relationships that pops up.   Can anyone tell me, or direct me, to where I can learn what it means for one service to be a member of another service?

[HugoFirst]

Hello Patricia,

A quick look at cmdb_rel_type on our instance shows 36 relationship types and a some of them could be pertinent to Business Services.   Your use of "members/member of" is probably as good a choice as any.   You might also consider "Contains/Contained by", "Depends on/Used by",   "Provides/Provided By", "Powers/Powered By" and "Uses/Used by".

My personal preference would be to add a couple of types specifically for Business Services, such as

-   Service/Sub Service

-   Employs/Employed by

-   Consists of/Comprises

Here's some reference material for you to look over as you decide.

Suggested Relationships - ServiceNow Wiki

Defining CI Relationships - Link:

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Defining_CI_Relationships#gsc.tab=0

[Gurpreet07]

We are using Depends on::Used by as a relationship type for business services. Also we are making use of field 'Parent' present on the same table . The primary business service is parent of all its additional business services are a part of original business service. Now for relationships we created a business rule that is establishing the relationship on the basis of parent service.

[vkambham · Accepted solution]

Hi Patricia,

The "suggested relationships" are exactly what they are .. they are just a starting point for building meaningful maps. There is not much functionality or benefits that can be derived from choosing a particular relationship type over other except for better readability of BSM maps.

But there is plugin called Service portfolio Management (Service Portfolio Management - ServiceNow Wiki) that gives some functionality to manage a Service and it's parts also called as Service Offerings.   This provides a dashboard to look an entire service and it's offerings on one page, SLA performance, etc. The gap in this plugin is that these relationships are in turn not represented on the BSM map.    

Hope this gives   you another angle to look from..