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VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Disclaimer

Any statements, opinions and remarks made by me in this community post are personal. As such, they are not representing any official stand of my employer. The text here is reflecting my personal experience working 8 years in the ServiceNow ecosystem as partner, customer and now as a ServiceNow employee. Needless to say, I draw on the insights of all the smart people I have had the pleasure to work with during my professional career.

Introduction

In this very first Now Community post of mine, I'll briefly concentrate on:

  • approaching CSDM
  • foundation data - life cycle thinking

My goal is to write a few articles under the broad CSMD topic during 2021. The overall intention is to look behind the whitepaper. 

Approaching CSDM 

Do you ever get this feeling when working around CSDM?

find_real_file.png

Believe me, you are not the only one. I see this feeling often derive and result from taking a wrong approach to begin with. Something that works for an organisation may not be the best fit for yours. 

One exact golden rule to follow does not really exist in my opinion but there are a few things to every organisation consider. These include topics that help you formulate a fit for purpose approach for you organisation. Let me give a few pointers.

CSDM is not an outcome but supports achieve desired business outcomes

Being CSDM 'compliant' (such does not really even exist) does not in itself take an organisation forward. A better approach is to tie actions and phases to your desired outcomes and overall roadmap.

Let's imagine your initial scope is ITSM. You surely have some business reasoning to have made the move to ServiceNow platform. Any expected improvements to support modernising your ITSM operations should also drive actions taken from CMDB viewpoint under CSDM framework.

Define your critical use cases for your processes including reporting first. This fuels the must-haves for CMDB setup governed by CSDM. Acknowledge what you may not be able to do initially based on your chosen approach. For example, targeting infrastructure at first and leaving service layer to smaller attention will:

  • reduce business context around various operations; e.g. assessing actual business impact of a change request requires service awareness
  • reduce ability to execute service driven service level management
  • reduce ability to manage actual service outages

The key is to not only understand what the chosen approach enables but also what the implications are. So, instead of than just documenting technical data classes along with your phases, it is better to also include what the particular data enables for your operations giving it more business context. Internal discussions around this are never easy but are easier when this type of home work has been done. 

Translate CSDM to your business

Your business likely has a set of terms or language that is commonly used. The fact is, your business language will not change. At least, such a change would be very hard to accomplish. Neither will change the official terms and descriptions prescribed by CSDM. 

There very likely will be the time when you have a set of data of importance to you required to be managed in CMDB while it may seem hard to fit directly in CSDM prescriptions. This requires translation which should not be done hastily. In addition, ensure that a sufficient participation of decisive stakeholders takes place. Involve experts from your implementation partners as well.

E.g. the term service is used various contexts. Officially, a service is an outcome expected by a customer. A service goes along with action. Something tangible does not really constitute towards a service.

Scale CSDM efforts for your organisation

Whatever you do, do not target for something your organisational structure cannot support. Do not establish something that cannot be maintained. 

The play is utterly different in a scenario where there is a dedicated and centralised config team with a defined CMDB process in place vs. having a single config manager or not having a CMDB process formally in place.

Why should you try to model and establish something comprehensively that lacks e.g. clear ownerships? There might even be some internal debate on how manage different types of data. Better to start small allowing room for expansion than trying to guess on behalf of your internal subject matter experts.

In practice, it is not really realistic to explicitly follow CSDM suggested phases crawl, walk, run, fly or the dedicated outcome based approach either. In reality, it is very likely you'll end up having a mix of phases ongoing for different types of services supported by different types of technology.

Preserve time for OCM

Funnily enough, often CSDM/CMDB is not mentioned in communication or training plans. Instead, the focus is fully on training some admins initially as well as getting the agents up to speed. I say that CSDM/CMDB should have its own dedicated place in these plans.

ServiceNow CMDB is very extensive even without complementary products such as ITOM. The current CMDB Fundamentals class is 3-day training alone. Acquiring basic understanding what is out there is a step closer to your success.

You may want to consider involving the CMDB process key stakeholders in establishing any policy, guideline and process documentation. Plan and deliver recurring info sessions, maybe even for targeted groups such as service owners, infrastructure teams and agents working on cases.

Prepare documentation that explains why things are done in your predefined way including the value aspect for different audiences. Internal complaints are more than likely. Preparation helps manage these situations.

CSDM is a framework

Finally, embrace the fact that CSDM is a framework. This is also stated in the first sentences of the white paper. I derive a few things from this:

  • frameworks are not a exact rule book
  • in real life scenarios, frameworks cannot really be leveraged fully by the book due to resource, technology, budget, compliance, regulation etc. constraints
  • CSDM is not something you implement, CMDB is

Having said this, there are matters that are given and which should not be bypassed:

  • no need to deviate from the prescribed relationships
  • understand how the different types of services are defined
    • a colleague of mine will write an article about Application Services giving more technical aspect to the class in the near future. I'll link the article here once it is available.
  • understand how the different types of applications are defined
  • many ServiceNow products lean on data being defined in prescribed data classes; leverage the CSMD product views and consider this when planning for platform expansion.

 

Foundation Data

I chose foundation data for this article as it affects each and every organisation and therefore their CSDM/CMDB efforts as well. I know what you are thinking. Your are thinking that your foundational data quality is not good. Get over it! Generally speaking, other organisations are not better off with this topic.

For many organisations, foundation data becomes widely visual across the organisation when they start using ServiceNow. This may be the first time the organisation tries to workflow something relying on their foundation data. I am not going into further details here on example issues but you can view this blog post by @mikkojuola discussing resulting issues.

The main differences between organisations around this topic are:

  • how data deviations are managed overall
  • lifecycle thinking for foundation data

I'll concentrate on the life cycle thinking here. When establishing foundation data you need to:

  • understand and document the full data flow chain resulting in having foundation data in the platform; documenting the primary source for ServiceNow is not enough
  • define what concludes a data object to be obsolete
  • define what actions are taken for obsolete data objects and when in relation to first sighting of such occurrence
  • describe how data deviations are managed

Unfortunately, foundation data is often part of platform core configuration and rushed for getting into process implementations. Surely, the related debt is to be paid later on. 

Why this life cycle thinking is important also for foundation data?

Firstly, just think of the user object in ServiceNow and how many other data objects relate to it. Many of these data objects are just as well obsolete when the user is ultimately invalid. You do not want to have this kind of data mixed with current operational data.

Secondly, without life cycle thinking it is harder to execute reliable reporting and/or data audits against your CMDB data. This can lead to a scenario where the expected attributes are in place while they are false in reality. I.e. audit activities may indicate green status while the situation is more towards red under the surface. 

Ending words

First of all, thanks for reading! I would be very pleased to hear your tips and experience around the two main topics of this article in the comments below:

  • approaching CSDM
  • foundation data - life cycle thinking

I'll close the article with the below key takeaways:

  • remember CSDM is a framework, not a rule book providing answers to your unique scenario
  • CSDM is not something to implement but your CMDB management can be adopted to follow CSDM
  • understand to your best ability any implications your chosen approach has beside what it enables
  • broaden your thinking around foundation data from plain data imports to valued data having a life cycle
 
Comments
Steve Skinner
Tera Contributor

Hi Venni

Interesting article! Regarding Foundation Data I have a question and a comment on experience.

Question: Do you mean everything shown in the Foundation Domain of the CSDM 3.0 Data Model or just the objects included Core (or Common) Data?

Experience: At my last employer (a large global group of over 100 operating companies), there was effectively no ownership of the Core Data. As an example most IT people assumed that the HR departments in the operating companies at least owned the user life-cycle but generally HR were only interested in employees of the company and not contractors or 3rd party users who needed access for one reason or another.

We were building a single global ServiceNow instance for ITSM - we did not have the time or the resources to do anything but use a global directory which was in turn fed by a huge array of disparate data sources owned and maintained by the operating companies. It was a certainly a challenge because, as you've said, this data was hugely important for our implementation.

It was a recognised problem faced by every global project within the group - I envy anyone who has implemented a solution in their organisation!

VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Hi Steve,

Big thanks for sharing. 

To address your question: "Do you mean everything shown in the Foundation Domain of the CSDM 3.0 Data Model or just the objects included Core (or Common) Data?"

--> My focus here was core data. This data is always in play regardless of how ServiceNow is finally used. And every ServiceNow implementation includes usage of this type of data.

The scenario you described is definitely something a single party nor a ServiceNow architecture/platform team can themselves make better. This moves closer towards to overall company strategy and how Enterprise Architecture is executed to support that strategy. Tangible actions around this would require c-level decisions and sponsorship. Not an easy nut to crack.

 
Stig Brandt
Giga Guru

Interesting article, and very good to see some activities from ServiceNow around the CSDM - Framework, next article may I suggest to come up with business value for going down the CSDM route, as in my experience this is a heavy path for many companies and will required heavy investments.

 

When that said, I don't see CSDM only as a framework - not a rule book. CSDM is maybe a framework, but first and foremost a hard defined "Data model" - that have huge impact on all modules within ServiceNow - and you really need to follow the data model to gain - most value implementing various ServiceNow modules - and of course here is Foundation and all other Data governance extremely important:

find_real_file.png

 

mikkojuola
Mega Guru

Thanks for your thoughts and insight into this topic Venni.

Since you already shared my post on the "Importance of Foundation Data", I hope you don't mind, if I share another article here about "How to establish ownership in your CMDB": https://datacontentmanager.com/how-to-establish-ownership-in-your-cmdb/

Having a predefined model and phased approach is all good, but in order to succeed, you need to identify different roles around data management (consumer, owner, provider) and get commitment from each, especially the owner and provider before populating any data into your CMDB.

What are the best practices or simply good examples on how to establish (data) ownership in your organizations? 

Cheers,

--Mikko

VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Thanks for the comment!

This is definitely a matter of perspective and how is business value understood in this context. In order not to re-invent the wheel, example value statements and outcomes are referenced in this public CSDM resource: https://nowlearning.service-now.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&asset_id=9a353c80dbb764903ce56451ca961997

ServiceNow products have their own value statements. Maybe CSDM could be seen to support these. Maybe CSDM could even be considered as a supporting capability for optimal usage of different ServiceNow products and achieving those business outcomes, whatever they may be.

Like you said, many ServiceNow products expect underlying data to be present in a certain way for proper use.

 

 
VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

This definitely one of the key success factors and must for successful CMDB setup and governance. Thanks for the comment!

 
c016smith
Tera Contributor

Thanks for sharing this link Venni - I've watched every CSDM presentation I can find on Youtube, and reviewed the CSDM training available on ServiceNow sites. This is the first time I've seen this particular slide-deck, but am still very eager to get new comprehensive examples from @scott.lemm as K21 wraps up.  We still struggle internally about the various approaches to Services and Service Offerings, and the examples that we see only provide part of the picture (and then other examples have a completely different or oppositional approach to defining and linking services/offerings). 

 

Still some great visuals here in this slide-deck, so thanks for sharing. Looking forward to more examples and presentations of how others have built-out their service portfolio. 

Stig Brandt
Giga Guru

Hi @c016smith 

 

Have you seen the latest slides for CSDM3.0 from nowcreate, there is a description of the process to define a service definition

find_real_file.png

find_real_file.png

VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Yep, this is indeed in the public resource I also linked above. Good to be aware of this great material my colleagues are always improving 🙂

 
c016smith
Tera Contributor

Yes, and thanks @Stig Brandt - that is exactly where I saw this for the first time, so thanks again @Venni Mäkäräinen for the post.

 

I heard there were some new examples and documentation about CSDM supposed to be released before or during K21 - any updates you've heard on the inside as a ServiceNow employee?  🙂


Can you tell I'm still SUUUPER in demand for a comprehensive set of examples for services/service offerings from business and technical side, so we can try to ratify our new portfolio of services in the CSDM framework. Thanks

VenniMakarainen
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Couple very good articles on application services authored by my colleague David Skowronek.

 

Application Services: How to use them?

 

Application Services: Tips and Tricks

 

 
BigMouth
Mega Guru

My relatively small experience has always struggled to onboard an Enterprise Architect decision making when the scope, again relatively is "small ITSM project" at an organisational level. 

Even the product owners at customers really struggle to get the EA onboard. 

Any tips/tricks (magic wand) to get this rolling @Venni Mäkäräinen 

Nice and smooth article !!

Cheers

Ishan 

Joel L
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

In general, I have seen but cannot explain why core data and data stewardship are not defined and owned properly thereby creating multiple efforts for each silo that defines the needed data without proper ownership themselves for 'practical' reasons to be able to go forward (into your technical debt hell).

 

The example of a 'relatively' small ITSM project just underpins this. How can any process in a service value chain be unimportant and small when there is basically no enterprise that works without IT being an essential part of that chain?

 

I urge you before thinking about the CSDM data model, to let Enterprise Architects, Executives, Process, and Service Owners align on a framework and proper understanding of service design before you touch technology.

Examples would be ITIL, IT4IT, and USM.

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‎04-29-2021 12:16 AM
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