How do you categorize your "customers" and does that influence your service structure?

[ahbrook]

Hey everyone! 

I've been bouncing around for the last couple of months, trying to figure out how best to fit ServiceNow to our particular institution's needs. Sadly, I got here too late to see the workshops and presentations that have been put on in the past... so I figure an open conversation should work as well.

My main questions are:

- As a College or University, how do you break down your "Customers?" For instance - we have the student body, faculty, staff, prospective students, library patrons, decentralized/college based IT shops, people who attend football games, conferences, and so on. How do you properly represent all of these audiences and views? 

- Related to the above: The CSDMv5 cays "Business Services" are orderable by business users, while "Technology Management Services" underpin the business services and are published to service owners. How do you split up your various applications and services into those two categories, especially when a given individual can fit into multiple roles and audiences in the University? 

So a bit more of a deep dive to explain the questions and what I'm getting at:

We have recently implemented ServiceNow ITSM in order to replace our older ITSM software. We have around 12 IT shops on campus - one that focuses on the administrative side of the house (including managing ERPs, networking services, and datacenter/provisioning services), one that focuses on the student affairs side of the house, and then a myriad of college-specific IT shops with a few people in them. This also includes our library, as well as two "Lab schools" we maintain which are actually K-12 schools. 

For the most part, we moved over our existing CMDB into the new system, trying our best to link up the existing application instances and CIs as much as we could. However, we never really had the concept of University-wide (or even departmental) services locked down. 

My research says that while this works, it is not the way ServiceNow is designed. ServiceNow assumes you'll pin the logical/discovered application instances and CIs up to the services and service offerings, mapped out per the CSDMv5. So with a "blank slate" so to speak, I've been trying to figure out how to make this map so that we can then tie groups and ownership to various elements.

As I'm learning more about Enterprise Architecture, I'm also discovering the higher portfolio management elements - such as business capabilities and the like. I'm trying to "describe" what we do, and what would be considered our products and so on. 

To that end, I'm trying to anchor to standard models out there. The first one I was looking at was the "Technology Business Management" taxonomy v5.0.1 . This got referenced a couple times in ServiceNow as a good model to use, as it places things into financial perspectives - an important thing for Universities to track! However, the ServiceNow to TBM mapping/integration document looks a little out of date. It also only provides a few examples of service offerings, and no clarification on if things are considered business or technology management services.  There is an area over there to look into Higher Education uses and possibly extending the TBM model, but it seems to have stalled with no real updates I can see in the last few years.

The other big model I'm referencing is the Educause Higher Education IT Service Catalog . This document is a bit older, having been published in 2019. It also goes down the route of categories, then services, then offerings. However, it breaks down in that it doesn't do the ServiceNow split into Technology Management and Business Services. Still, it is likely a better overall reference, because it has specific needs that Universities face, which your typical business wouldn't. It's less broken down than the TBM taxonomy, which may be simpler for others to understand. 

At the end of the day, I'm trying to follow the CMDB implementation strategy ServiceNow provides, following Crawl/Walk/Run/Fly staging. That means identifying our most important business applications (easy enough), then technical management services/offerings (harder), and finally for my purposes, our business services/offerings. I just want to demonstrate that this is the right way to go, so I can get buy-in for others to help map this out. But if I could come to my higher ups with concrete examples of how other Universities have adopted the CSDM and service portfolio management to their institutions, then it would go a LONG way. 

(And I'm more than willing to help put in the work to develop that if no one's really approached it yet.)