6 Steps to make your CSDM RUN phase a success
In my previous blogs, I—Dylan Veerman—already provided some tips on how to make your CRAWL and WALK phase a success. This time, we’ll dive into the CSDM RUN phase. But first, a small recap on CSDM. The Common Service Data Model is an essential part of ServiceNow’s data model. It is the foundation of all ServiceNow IT Workflows—from ITSM, ITOM, PPM, Application Portfolio Management to Governance, Risk & Compliance, etc. There is a standard approach for CSDM provided by ServiceNow, consisting of the phases Crawl, Walk, Run and Fly. This means a phased implementation of the data model is best. But be aware: you cannot apply the ServiceNow approach to your entire IT landscape. That’s why we’ll provide some guidance to get your through your complete CSDM journey to start Flying.
In order to make your CSDM RUN Phase a success, we advise you to take the following 6 steps:
1. Involve business users and service owners
When you’ve reached the RUN phase of CSDM, you’re entering the Sell/Consume domain. This domain is all about reaching out to service consumers. In order to maximize the value for consumers and customers, it’s important to involve them in the process as soon as possible. Additionally, this phase allows you to include non-IT services, like workplace services/facility services, etc.
The first step would be to identify a group of business stakeholders or key customers that you would like to involve. Take a deep dive with them into the services consumed to understand the service and offering commitments and required SLAs. Make sure that these service consumers understand the defined services and service offerings. Next, identify and involve the relevant service owners to translate the more technical services into end-user and customer-proof business services. This will greatly improve the Employee and Customer Experience.
TIP: If your organization does not have service owners yet, you should start thinking of employees that would be suitable for the job. Service owners are responsible for end-to-end Service Delivery and Performance. Identifying and involving service owners is key for success.
2. Define SLAs and subscription methods
Introducing Business Service Offerings and Business Services into your ServiceNow environment enables SLA management. Defining commitments on the Business Service Offering allows for SLA tracking on a different level than the Incident Task priority. We recommend tracking SLAs on business offering level by leveraging the commitments. In case commitments are in place, you could compare the OLAs with the SLAs for any service. Important to keep in mind here is that commitments to the business should not be stricter than the ones agreed upon with the supplier or internal support depts.
Next, decide how you want to subscribe users to the business service (offerings). You have multiple subscription options to choose from: user, company, location, department and group. Pick the one that matches your organizations’ structure best. By subscribing users to business service offerings, you greatly improve the Employee Experience as this will only show items in the Service Catalogue that are relevant to them.
3. Identify and select business services
Now it is time to identify which services you want to bring to the RUN maturity level. Not all services need to be defined up to business service level. Decide per service whether it’s worth to define a business service and service offering for it. Don’t boil the ocean, so make a selection of services to start on first. There are multiple ways to prioritize. The most common ways of prioritizing are by filtering on the most frequently used, most critical or most expensive services. Make your selection based on available data related to time requested, service criticality and perhaps financial details of services. The selected number of services for the first batch differs and often depends on available resources on your side.
Don’t know where to start with identifying business services? The easiest starting point is to dive into your instance and see which services are currently already defined and offered to internal or external users. In case there are no services defined in the current environment, we can provide a list of standard services. We’ll walk you through this standard list to tailor it your business environment.
Tip: Start your journey with the top 5 most critical business services.
4. Define your business services (your offering)
After you’ve selected your business services, it will become evident on how you should continue defining your business services. In the end, you’ll have your total service offering to (internal/external) customer defined. First, it is important to focus on delivering strategic business value by building a business service hierarchy into logical service portfolios. Next, you define the service offerings based on availability, scope, pricing, etc. Lastly, you include required agreements like external SLAs and internal OLAs to be measured for successful service delivery management.
5. Close the GAP (relate/depend business to IT)
In this step, you start with mapping the business services to the defined business service offerings. Each business service should have at least one or more business service offerings. How to do this? Zoom in on your business service offerings to understand what services are required for this offering. Note that multiple business services can provide a single business service offering. You do this to get a grip on what business services (and offerings) are relevant to which consumer. The goal here is to only show relevant services to your customers and end-users.
The next step is an exciting one! You can start connecting business and IT in the service model. By now, you know the relation between your business services and business service offerings per customer group. First, create dependencies to understand what application services a business service relies on. This will show the business criticality of an application service and its related SLAs/OLAs. Now, do you remember step 5 of the WALK phase? In this step, technical service offerings and related CIs were mapped to application services and related CIs that were already linked are now related to what is critical to your business.
6. Expand
Now that you have your CSDM populated for your 5 most critical business services, identify the next batch of business services and repeat the steps above. Once you’re all done, you’ve successfully completed the CSDM RUN phase and you can move on to the FLY phase.
Need help?
In case this all sounds really daunting, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’re experts in the field of CSDM, so we can help you with any kind of questions or issues you might have. We also developed a special (online) game to spark the CSDM discussion within your company. Contact us if you’d like to know more about the game or CSDM in general.
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Dylan Veerman