Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain Separation and Continual Improvement Management

    Domain separation in Continual Improvement Management (CIM) allows ServiceNow customers to organize data, processes, and administrative tasks into distinct domains. This separation controls user access to data, ensuring that only authorized personnel can view relevant information based on their domain. It is essential for optimizing service provider use cases and supports separation across various application components, including user interfaces and reporting.

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    Key Features

    • Data and process separation across multiple domains, enhancing security and relevance.
    • Improvement initiatives can be created and managed within separate domains without requiring additional setup.
    • Key tables such as the Improvement Register and CIM Tasks support domain separation, ensuring users only see tasks relevant to their domain.
    • Domain and Domain Path columns in CIM tables help identify and manage improvement initiatives effectively.

    Key Outcomes

    With domain separation, customers can expect:

    • Enhanced visibility and control over improvement initiatives specific to their organizational domain.
    • Streamlined collaboration among users within the same domain, while maintaining necessary confidentiality and security across different domains.
    • Improved task assignment and management, as users can only access initiatives relevant to their domain, ensuring focused and efficient workflows.

    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.