With the help of our CSDM and CMDB experts, we’ve created this guide to help you learn more about this best practice framework. So, you can improve your business services, applications, and the infrastructure that supports them.
What is ServiceNow CSDM?
Common Service Data Model (CSDM) is a standardized framework that defines service-related terms and relationships for all ServiceNow products. It is both the data structure and the data development that supports your operations and provides your executives with key data. In fact, it is ideal for mapping technology into capabilities that support and align with your organization.
Imagine you bought a Millenium Falcon Lego set. You sit down, ready to bring it to life. But suddenly you realize something, you have a LOT of different pieces and a clear goal in mind but without the instruction manual, you have no idea where to begin.
Just like an inventory sheet tells you what pieces you have, the CMDB tells you what components exist in your environment, such as servers, applications, users, software, and more.
Similarly, CSDM is the instruction manual. It gives structure and guidance to your data, showing how the components relate to each other. So, you can deliver services more effectively.
Unlike a plugin or tool, CSDM is not something you install. It’s a model that helps you use standard terms and relationships, improve data quality and reporting, and align IT with business goals.
Why should you follow the ServiceNow CSDM?
Following the CSDM gives your CMDB purpose along with a clear view of everything. It matters because it:
- Brings consistency on how data is structured and named
- Helps identify relationships between apps and services
- Improves incident resolution and change analysis
- Makes ownership and responsibilities clear
- Builds trust and brings purpose to your configuration data
In short, ServiceNow CSDM transforms your CMDB from a static inventory into a dynamic decision-making tool.
The benefits of ServiceNow CSDM
CSDM gives you the structure to scale with confidence. A well-implemented CSDM has benefits across IT and business operations, such as:
- Faster incident resolution because you can understand what’s impacted and why
- Better change management to reduce failed changes with clearer dependencies
- Improved service mapping to see how applications support business processes
- Greater visibility so you can keep an eye on everything from technical teams to executives
- More reliable reporting for clean and connected data
- Support for other ServiceNow modules like APM, ITOM, ITSM, and SPM
How to get started with ServiceNow CSDM
Starting with ServiceNow CSDM doesn’t mean a massive overhaul. It’s designed to be rolled out in phases.
Here’s how to get started:
- Start with foundation data – Make sure your users, locations, contracts, and departments are accurate and complete.
- Model your business applications – Microsoft Teams, SAP, or ServiceNow.
- Link to infrastructure – Identify the servers, databases, or network elements that support each application.
- Add services and offerings – Define what you offer to internal or external users.
- Connect services to business capabilities – Understand what each service enables.
Our biggest advice is to start small, maybe just one department or application, and grow from there.
Implementing CSDM in ServiceNow
CSDM is built into the ServiceNow platform, so implementation is about aligning your data and not installing new things.
You begin by assessing the current data health using CMDB dashboards. From there, map existing records to the CSDM tables, define missing relationships, and use ServiceNow tools like the CMDB Workspace, Service Graph Connectors, CI Class Manager and Service Mapping to help automate and validate your work.
What is the current version of ServiceNow CSDM?
The latest version is CSDM 5.0. Check out our ServiceNow CSDM 5.0 blog for more in-depth information.
From a bird’s eye view, the new 5.0 version introduces a new domain, Ideation & Strategy and offers better support for modern environments including DevOps, AI/ML, and digital products. Table structures and naming conventions have also been updated for more clarity and flexibility.
The new version is designed for modern organizations that need clear visibility into services from planning to delivery.
What challenges can ServiceNow CSDM solve?
CSDM helps solve common service management problems, such as:
- Poor visibility into application and service relationships
- Impact analysis before changes
- Confusion over who owns what
- Inefficient troubleshooting and incident resolution
- Difficulty prioritizing changes and risks
- Inconsistent reporting across departments
By aligning your data model to the CSDM, you get better insights and stronger service delivery.
The domains of ServiceNow CSDM
ServiceNow CSDM is structured into key domains, each reflecting a stage in the service lifecycle:
- Foundation – Core reference data (users, locations, groups, contracts)
- Design & planning – Business capabilities, applications
- Service delivery – Active service components, service management offerings, infrastructure, and technical service components
- Service consumption – Everything end users’ access, such as service catalogs and offerings
Bonus tip: You can choose to implement a different domain depending on your needs, but a strong foundation is non-negotiable.
What are the phases of ServiceNow CSDM implementation?
In addition to building a foundation, CSDM is implemented in four practical phases. The phases after that are often called:
- Crawl – To build your foundation and model basic application-to-infra connections
- Walk – To add technical services, dynamic CI groups, and service offerings
- Run – To create a business service portfolio, add business services and offerings.
- Fly – To add business capabilities and information objects with request catalogue.
This staged approach helps you avoid being overwhelmed while showing quick wins at each step.
CSDM Crawl phase
ServiceNow’s phased approach starts with the CRAWL phase. Here are five tips to get you get started off on the right track:
1) Create an overview of your Business Applications and Application Services
It seems trivial, but a complete overview of all applications is often missing, especially in large enterprises. This first step is essential to get started with CSDM. So, make sure all of your Business Applications and Application Services are in ServiceNow.
2) Understand ownership and responsibilities for Business Applications and Application Services
It’s important to clearly identify who owns a business application and who is responsible for its service quality and operations (ownership). Also, remember to include any external suppliers you’ve outsourced application services to, especially if they’re hosting them in their own (cloud) data centers.
Tip: During your CSDM CRAWL efforts, focus on the services that you manage yourself.
3) Determine business criticality of Application Services
Now that we have a list of Application Services that you are responsible for, it’s important to understand how critical they are to the business. The reason for this step is that not all application services are equally critical. Focus on highly critical services first. Manage them properly and implement changes in a controlled manner.
To determine criticality, involve the Business Application Owners to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and score your services. In case you’re not using the custom tables provided in your ITSM bundle, you could use them to support this process to collect input from your service owners. Want to know which questions to ask or how to do a Business Impact Analysis? Please ask us for our best practices in this area.
Tip: Start your journey with the top 25 most critical Business Applications.
4) Critical CIs first
Now that we’ve got a list of 25 critical Business Application that you’re responsible for, we should now focus on getting the critical Configuration Items (CIs) in place.
You need to work with your Application Owners and the groups responsible for supporting your services to identify the right data. The trick is to train these people in what the CSDM is and how to maintain this data in ServiceNow themselves. The CSDM game we developed is a nice way to ensure teams understand the meaning and importance of the CSDM. This game can be played virtually or hosted in our office, whichever you prefer.
During the CSDM CRAWL phase, focus on critical components like your Load Balancers, Application servers, Database Servers, key network equipment and other major components. Create simple dependencies between these Critical CIs. Ensure they’re related to the right Application Service and that the Application Services are related to the right Business Application.
Tip: Less is more. Especially when you need to maintain this data manually.
5) Expand
Now that you have your common service data model populated for your 25 most critical services, identify the next batch of Business Applications / Application Services to populate.
CSDM Walk phase
The WALK phase provides some interesting possibilities, especially when you decide to use ServiceNow Event Management. Doing so will give you an instant overview of which critical CIs are failing and how this affects your (critical) Application Services.
Not only will this reduce your Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR), it will also ensure better risk assessment for changes. Knowing which critical CIs are linked to one another will ensure the right precautions can be taken to avoid any unplanned downtime of critical Application Services, reducing the number of P1s and ultimately improving business performance.
As you move through the CRAWL and WALK phase, the amount of data you need to capture in your CSDM exponentially increases. Therefore, we strongly advise looking into automated discovery options to keep your transition manageable.
To make your CSDM WALK Phase a success, we advise you to take the following 5 steps:
1) Create a Technical Services and Offerings overview
The effectiveness of your Application Services largely depends on your Technical Services, in combination with their offerings. Examples of Technical Services are hosting (windows), internet access, Local/Wide Area Network, storage (SAN), identity management (like AD), anti-virus, etc. In enterprises, this list is usually shorter than the list of Application Services.
When listing your Technical Service Offerings, it is important to work with a clear definition. According to the ServiceNow CSDM Whitepaper, a “Technical service offering is a service offering type defined as a stratification of the technical service into options including localization/geography, environment, pricing, availability, capability, support group (for incident), technical approval group (for change), and packaging options (commitments).”
Let’s take Identity Management as an example of a Technical Service. Associated offerings could be Active Directory Azure Cloud (external hosting) or Active Directory 2018 Prod / Active Directory 2018 Non-Prod (internal hosting). Looking at the internal hosting options, it is important to differentiate between Prod and Non-Prod, because their service levels differ.
2) Understand ownership and responsibilities
To capture the right data, you need to know who’s responsible. Therefore, it is essential to understand who is accountable (ownership) for service quality and service operations.
Some have outsourced the responsibility for a technical service to an external supplier, like Azure Cloud. Our advice is to focus your CSDM WALK efforts on the technical services that you manage in-house or of which you are the asset owner. The latter situation occurs when organizations have outsourced network maintenance to an external vendor but still own the majority of the network equipment (like routers, switches, etc.).
3) Determine criticality
Now that we have a list of Technical Services and Technical Service Offerings for which you are responsible, it is important to determine their criticality.
We need to focus on highly critical services first, set up monitoring and implement changes in a controlled manner. Involve the Technical Service Owners to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and score your services. In case you aren’t using the custom tables provided in your ITSM bundle, you could use them to support this process to collect input from your service owners.
If you’d like help with asking the right questions or performing a Business Impact Analysis, do reach out to us.
Tip: Start with your top 25 most critical Technical Service Offerings.
4) Link Technical Service Offerings to corresponding Application Services
Now that we have identified the critical Technical Service Offerings, we can link them to the Application Services they support. This overview is key, because once in place, a Technical Service Owner can see the impact of a change on related applications with a single click. The other way around, your Application Owners and Support Groups can see all dependencies, and they know exactly who to contact when incidents occur.
Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the Technical Service Offering object is used to capture important information like Approval and Support Group. The data you capture at this level can now be easily copied to associated CIs, which makes maintaining this data at CI level much easier, keeping things manageable.
5) Identify and link critical CIs of Technical Service Offerings to critical CIs of Critical Application Services
Criticality is important in this step, emphasizing the need to do more with less. IT infrastructures are becoming more and more complex, so you need to focus on what matters most. For the 25 most critical Technical Services Offerings you are responsible for, we’ll now focus on getting the critical Configuration Items (CIs) in place:
First, you need to map out the dependencies between critical Application Services and critical Technical Service Offerings. Since you have created this overview in step 4, this information is now easy to extract.
Next, the Technical Service Offering owners need to identify the critical CIs, like your SAN instances, key network equipment and other large building blocks that are connected to the critical CIs linked to your Application Services (application servers, database servers, etc.). In case you don’t have these critical Application Service CIs, then you probably have forgotten some steps in the CRAWL phase.
Don’t forget to map out the interdependencies between critical CIs as well.
CSDM Run phase
To make your CSDM RUN Phase a success, make sure to follow these six 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. 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’d 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 to 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 commitments. In case commitments are in place, you could compare the OLAs with the SLAs for any service. It’s important to remember that commitments to the business should not be stricter than the ones agreed upon with the supplier or internal support departments.
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 defining a business service and service offering for it. Don’t boil the ocean, so make a selection of services to start first.
There are multiple ways to prioritize. The most common ways of prioritizing are 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 the available resources on your side.
Don’t know where to start 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 to 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 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 by mapping the business services to the defined business service offerings. Each business service should have at least one or more business service offerings.
How do you 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 common service data model 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.
CSDM Fly phase
The final phase, FLY phase, turns your CMDB into a strategic tool. We advise taking the following five steps to make it a success:
1) Identify use cases/services for FLY phase
Determine which services and use cases should be taken up to the FLY maturity level. As stated in the previous blogs, you don’t need to promote every service to the FLY stage.
2) Service Catalog
In this phase, the Service Catalog is introduced. Previously, catalog items were created and placed within a category and subcategory. Now, you’ll introduce Service Offerings that will be related to a Catalog Item, which will be published in the Service Catalog.
By relating the Catalog Item to the Service Offering, you gain insight on Service Offering level, e.g. how often and by whom it is consumed. Furthermore, by leveraging the subscribed by functionality, you can manage access/view rights of offerings on your Service Portal.
When creating the Service Catalog, the best practice is to define multiple catalogs and see if certain bundles can be created related to a Service (e.g. Workplace bundle: Laptop, Mouse, Software).
3) Define Business Capabilities
The definition of Business Capabilities is very much a strategic exercise. Important here is to clearly describe what the organization is going to do in order to create value. When defining Business Capabilities, stick to Business and Enterprise Architecture. Within the market, there are frameworks and standards that can be leveraged to lower the effort related to defining Business Capabilities. Business Capabilities are hierarchical and can go up to 6 levels deep.
4) Link Business Capabilities with Business Applications and Business Services
To get an end-to-end view and allow for application and service rationalization, relationships should be created from Business Capability to the Business Application and the Business Services. These relationships will enable the organization to make informed decisions based on data coming from multiple layers within the organization (Operations, Sell/Consume, Design/Planning).
5) Relate Information Objects to Business Applications
In this step, you’re going to relate Information Objects to Business Applications. This step can be taken earlier if there is a clear need from an IRM or GDPR perspective. Make sure you administer what kind of data runs through the Business Applications and the databases serving it in order to understand and be aware of the risk locations related to data.
