Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management

    Domain separation in Continual Improvement Management (CIM) enables ServiceNow customers to logically segregate data, processes, and administrative tasks across multiple tenants or domains within the application. This separation includes data, user interface elements, cache, reporting, and aggregations to ensure secure and organized management of improvement initiatives. Domain separation is applied across all CIM features without requiring special setup or configuration, supporting multi-tenant use cases such as service providers managing improvements for different customers securely.

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    CIM uses domain separation to restrict visibility and access so that users only see improvement initiatives and tasks relevant to their domain or its parent/global domains. This structure supports effective governance and privacy of data across organizational boundaries.

    Key Features

    • Data and process isolation: Improvement initiatives and tasks are assigned to domains, ensuring users interact only with data in their authorized domains.
    • Domain-aware CIM tables: The Improvement Register ([sncimregister]) and CIM Tasks ([sncimtask]) tables include Domain and Domain Path fields to identify and enforce domain boundaries.
    • User access control: Users can view or create improvements only in their assigned domain, its parent domain, or the global domain, depending on their role and domain membership.
    • Multi-domain support: Improvement Managers with access to multiple domains can manage records within specific domains, ensuring appropriate content association and visibility.
    • Integrated application support: Records associated with integrated applications respect domain ownership, requiring users to belong to the corresponding domain to link records.

    Practical Implications for ServiceNow Customers

    • Service providers can securely manage improvement initiatives for various tenants, ensuring each tenant only accesses their relevant data and processes.
    • Improvement Requesters and Managers benefit from domain-specific visibility, which enhances data privacy and simplifies governance.
    • Admins must configure domain separation at the instance level to enable multi-tenant CIM functionality and control user access accordingly.
    • The domain fields in CIM tables can be personalized and displayed to improve transparency and management of domain-specific data.
    • Domain separation assures that all CIM-related business logic processes data correctly within its intended domain context, supporting accurate reporting and aggregation.

    Domain separation in Continual Improvement Management is configured to apply to all features of the application. Separation of data is configured along with separation of logic and process. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

    Support level: Basic

    • Business logic: Ensure that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • The application supports domain separation at run time. The domain separation includes separation from the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • The owner of the instance must set up the application to function across multiple tenants.

    Sample use case: When a service provider (SP) uses chat to respond to a tenant-customer’s message, the customer must be able to see the SP's response.

    For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.

    Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management overview

    When an improvement opportunity is discovered within your organization, you can implement the improvement in a structured manner using Continual Improvement Management with domain separation.

    Once an improvement initiative is created, the Improvement Manager uses the Improvement Register to review and prioritize the improvement, and assigns improvement tasks. CIM task owners are responsible to fulfill assigned tasks to the desired outcome of that improvement. Both Improvement Register and CIM Task tables support domain separation so the Improvement Requester, task owners, Improvement Coordinator, and Improvement Manager can view only the improvement initiatives and related tasks within the (tenant) domain to which they belong.

    How domain separation works in Continual Improvement Management

    Domain separation is supported in Continual Improvement Management with no CIM setup or configuration required. Improvements can be created in separate domains, including the global domain.

    Continual Improvement Management extends the platform Task [task] table.

    When domain separation is implemented, CIM users can view and request improvements initiatives only in the domain assigned. Domain and Domain Path columns are available for two main CIM tables (Improvement Register and CIM Tasks) provided with the base system. The Domain column contains the name of the domain to which the event or alert belongs, and the Domain Path column contains the unique domain identifier.

    Table Contents
    [sn_cim_register] Improvement Initiatives
    [sn_cim_task] CIM Tasks
    Note:
    If the domain column is not shown, click the Update Personalized List icon and add the required column. You can also add the domain path column, if desired.

    Use cases:

    • An Improvement Requester that belongs to the Acme domain creates an improvement initiative and wants to view it.

      A user must belong to the Acme domain, its parent domain, or the global domain to view the improvement initiative.

    • An Improvement Manager that belongs to a parent domain tries to view an improvement initiative in a child domain.

      The user of a parent domain can view improvement initiatives of the parent as well as all child domains of that parent.

    • An Improvement Requester that belongs to Acme domain wants to create an improvement initiative on behalf of another user in the Acme domain.

      A user must belong to the same domain as the user for which the improvement initiative is created.

    • An Improvement Requester wants to associate a record for an integrated application in the Acme domain.

      A user must belong to the domain of the integrated application from which a record is associated.

    • An Improvement Manager has access to multiple domains, but wants to update a record with content within a specific domain.

      The domain specified for the current record drives the functionality of that record and reference fields.