Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management
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Summary of Domain separation and Continual Improvement Management
Domain separation in Continual Improvement Management (CIM) allows ServiceNow customers to segregate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical domains. This separation applies comprehensively to all application features, including data, business logic, user interface, reporting, and caching. It ensures that users only access improvement initiatives and tasks relevant to their assigned domain, supporting multi-tenant environments such as service providers managing multiple customers.
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CIM supports domain separation natively without additional setup, enabling structured management of improvement opportunities within specific domains. Users like Improvement Requesters, Coordinators, Managers, and Task owners work within their domain boundaries, ensuring secure and organized handling of improvement initiatives.
Key Features
- Comprehensive domain separation: Separates data, logic, UI, reporting, and caching for domain-specific operation.
- Multi-tenant support: Designed for service providers to manage multiple customer domains, allowing controlled visibility and access to data.
- Domain-aware CIM tables: The Improvement Register and CIM Task tables include Domain and Domain Path fields to enforce domain visibility and data segregation.
- Role-based access within domains: Users see and manage only the improvement initiatives and tasks in their assigned domain or parent domains, maintaining strict data isolation.
- Automatic domain handling: CIM extends the platform Task table and supports domain separation at runtime without manual configuration.
Practical Use Cases
- An Improvement Requester in a specific domain can create and view initiatives only within that domain or its parent/global domains.
- Improvement Managers in parent domains can view and manage initiatives across child domains, enabling hierarchical oversight.
- Users can create improvement initiatives or associate records only if they belong to the same domain as the record or user involved.
- Managers with multiple domain access can update records specific to a chosen domain, ensuring accurate domain context.
Why This Matters
For ServiceNow customers, domain separation in CIM ensures secure, organized, and scalable improvement management across multiple organizational units or tenants. It enables service providers to maintain data privacy and integrity while coordinating improvements effectively within their respective domains. This capability supports better governance, compliance, and operational efficiency when handling continual improvement initiatives.
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 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 |
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.