Change Management use case

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated August 6, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Change Management use case

    The Change Management use case within IT Service Management (ITSM), specifically for incident and change processes, focuses on improving incident resolution times and preventing outages caused by changes. By leveraging the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) framework, ServiceNow customers can gain clear visibility into the impact of changes on services and service offerings, enabling more informed and efficient change approval and execution.

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    Key Features

    • Impact Understanding: CSDM enables users to see how a change affects related services and offerings, supporting better decision-making.
    • Dynamic Change Routing: Changes are automatically routed based on affected services and configured approval groups, minimizing manual effort.
    • Subscription-Based Impact Identification: Related lists on service offerings identify who subscribes to the service (by company, department, group, location, or user), allowing precise impact analysis during incidents or changes.
    • Approvals Based on Service Criticality: Business service offerings determine business approvers using approval groups and criticality levels, while technical service offerings define technical approvers and assignment groups for routing.
    • Synchronization to Configuration Items (CIs): Service offerings can be synchronized onto CIs they manage, reducing the overhead of manually maintaining data for large CI inventories.
    • Environment Identification: Service instances distinguish between production and non-production environments (DEV, QA, UAT), allowing filtering of non-prod environments as needed. The environment attribute is recommended over legacy attributes for this purpose.

    How to Apply in ServiceNow

    • Populate the Configuration Item attribute on the Change Request form with the target CI to leverage CI data for routing and service impact analysis.
    • Use the Impacted Services related list to associate services and service offerings affected by the CI, clarifying the scope of the change.
    • Optionally, specify the Service and Service Offering attributes to identify provider services responsible for the CIs.
    • Optionally, populate the Affected CI related list with additional CIs involved in the change, either manually or dynamically (dynamic population requires configuration beyond the base system).

    Key Outcomes

    By adopting the CSDM framework within Change Management, ServiceNow customers can expect enhanced context and transparency around changes. This includes clear identification of all configuration items and services impacted by changes, which supports streamlined routing, appropriate approvals, and minimizes risks of outages. Ultimately, this approach reduces mean time to resolve incidents and improves change success rates through better-informed decisions and automated processes.

    For ITSM, specifically incident and change, identifying the location of critical data can help reduce mean time to resolve incidents and eliminate outages caused by change.

    Key features of the Change Management use case

    Applying the CSDM framework provides value to Change Management in the following ways:
    • Enables users to understand the impact of a change on services and service offerings.
    • Changes are dynamically routed.
    • Change Management identifies and notifies all affected services to support the approval decision.

    Data elements available for use by Change Management.
    1. Subscription: Related lists on service offerings that identify who has access to the offering and thus may be impacted in an outage. An incident or change can identify impact using the subscribed by tables. The related lists are as follows:
      • Service Subscriptions by Company [service_subscribe_company]
      • Service Subscriptions by Department [service_subscribe_department]
      • Service Subscriptions by Group [service_subscribe_sys_user_grp]
      • Service Subscriptions by Location [service_subscribe_location]
      • Service Subscriptions by User [service_subscribe_sys_user]
    2. Business service offering may be used to provide the business approver based on approval_group and business_criticality. A business service may have multiple offerings, each with a different criticality.
    3. Technical service offering may be used to provide the technical approver approval_group and technical assignment group on the attribute assignment_group. May be used by change for routing of change and change tasks. May be synchronized onto the CI’s that the offerings manage thus reducing the manual overhead of maintaining manual data on thousands/millions of CI’s.
    4. Service instance (the table was formerly labeled application service) may be used to provide prod and non-prod (DEV, QA, UAT, etc.) environments. Non-prod environments may be filtered out if desired. The legacy used_for attribute maps to the environment attribute. You should use the environment attribute.
      Note:
      Some technology service offerings (the table was formerly labeled service offering) may identify the environment of the offering as well.

    Results of the Change Management use case

    The CSDM framework provides context for the changes. The context includes the CIs involved in the change and the services affected.

    Use the Change Request form to see the impact of the change. Complete the following steps:
    1. Populate the Configuration Item attribute [configuration_item] with the target CI for the change activity. You can then use this CI to identify details for change routing. For example, you can use the CI data, such as “Assignment Group” or "Approval Group," and provide information about the service impact by using dependency relationships.
    2. Populate the Impacted Services related list [task_cmdb_ci_service] with the services that are related to the populated CI. These may include services and service offerings.
    3. (Optional) Use the Service and Service Offering attributes to identify the provider services responsible for managing the selected CIs.
    4. (Optional) Use the Affected CI related list [task_ci] to identify the CIs that may have caused the change. These CIs are in addition to the CIs previously populated. The [task_ci] table can be populated dynamically or manually.
      Note:
      Dynamic population is not part of the base system. To use dynamic population, you need to configure the Change Request form.

    For more information

    See the video: How Change Management leverages the CSDM