Services Have Owners Identified

Get Well Playbook

Identify Owners for Your Services

A step-by-step guide to analyze and remediate CMDB data

Table of Contents

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

Audience

Problem Overview

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

How this playbook is structured

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Downstream Consequences

Impact on Your Business

Engagement Questions

Remediation Plays

Summary

Play 1: Identify Services with missing owners

Play 2: Assign Services to owners

Play 3: Govern Data

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

Help the reader identify and remediate missing Service owner data.

Author Peter Laudat Date 10/28/2020 Addresses HSD # HSD0007940 Applicable ServiceNow Releases All Releases Time required Approximately 1 to 8 hours Audience

Configuration Manager or Configuration Management team

ServiceNow Admin

Service Owner

Service Portfolio Manager

IT Senior Management

Problem Overview

ServiceNow recommends that organizations populate and maintain Service owner data. Service owners are responsible for managing and making decisions with respect to the utility (fitness for purpose) and warranty (availability, capacity, continuity, and security) components of the value provided by their respective Services/offerings. Omission of Service owner information reduces organizational ability to find Service owners to make appropriate decisions to help the business achieve desired outcomes.

Background

ServiceNow employs several key Service types:

Service Type

Description

Owner

Business Service

Published to and often orderable by business users who may also select desired Service Offerings and Service commitment levels via a Service Catalog

IT Product Manager

Service offering

Stratification of the Business Service into options, including localization/geography, pricing, availability, capability, criticality, business approval group (change) and packaging options

IT Product Manager

Application Service

Logical representation of a deployed application stack of Technical Service Offerings that is published to Business Service owners

IT Product Manager

Technical Service

Published to IT Service owners and typically underpins one or more Business Services. A technical Service may have an operational view made up of one or more Technical Service Offerings

IT Engineering Manager

Technical Service Offering

Stratification of Technical Services into options, including geography, environment, pricing, availability, capability, support group (incident), technical approval group (change), and packaging options

IT Engineering Manager

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

This playbook will help you find unpopulated Service ownership fields and will suggest procedures to maintain Service ownership data. Your organization can use populated Service owner data to hold Service owners accountable to manage Service value.

How this playbook is structured

This playbook is structured to guide the reader via the following plays:

Play 1 (analyze) helps you identify unpopulated Service "Owned by" fields

Play 2 (fix) helps you populate Service "Owned by" fields

Play 3 (govern) suggests data governance practices to ensure that Service owner information is populated and current

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Process - data entry of Service owner information was optional

Data Migration - Service owner data was omitted in bulk import from another source

Integration – Service owners were not documented when Services were mapped

Process – Service data certification process might not have required Service owner information or was nonexistent

Standards - unpublished best practice or deployment (implementation) guidelines (create Service without the owner data)

Downstream Consequences

Data Consequence

Not applicable

Operation Consequence

Unpopulated Service owner(s) reduce(s) organizational ability to locate Service owners to make decisions with respect to the management of the utility (fitness for purpose) and warranty (availability, capacity, continuity, and security) components of the value provided by their respective Services/offerings

App Consequence

Default reports will be unable to return Services by owner

Decreased ability to derive value from the CSDM 3.0 run stage that lays the foundation for Service Portfolio Management capabilities with Service Owner Workspace . Service Owner Workspace delivers a workspace where Service owners can monitor Service portfolios and effectively gain an overall understanding of Service-related information. Such information includes Service trends, improvement initiatives, Service performance, outage monitoring, and more.

Impact on Your Business

Missing Service owner information hinders Service owner visibility which can in turn impact organizational accountability, alignment, and agility with respect to the following desired business outcomes

Lower MTTR

Data Validation

Data Completeness

Incident Reduction

Service Awareness

Data Accuracy

Integrity of Relationships

Increase Operational Visibility

Process Alignment

Lifecycle Management

Audit/Compliance

System Integrity

Data Governance

Process Gaps

Service Level Awareness

Data Integration

Model Management

Process Automation

Service Awareness

Data Accuracy

Integrity of Relationship

Better User Experience

Platform Awareness

Model Management

Engagement Questions:

Consider the answers to these questions:

Does your organization manage business capabilities explicitly?

Does your organization know each business Service, Service offering, Application Service, Technical Service, and Technical Service Offering?

Do you know the performance and contribution levels of each Service?

Do you know the owner information for each and every Service?

What is the source of records for Service ownership data?

How do you maintain Service owner information?

How often is Service ownership data updated or certified?

Remediation Plays

Summary

Play

Analyze Data

What this play is about

Identify and analyze Services with missing owners Required tasks

Run a report to find Services with missing owner information Fix Data

What this play is about

Populate previously empty Service owner fields Required tasks

Populate previously empty Service Owned by fields Goven Data

What this play is about

Advice and good practices to govern the data Required tasks

Establish standard operating procedures, as well as periodic data certification

Play 1 - Analyze Data

What this Play is about

You will review the various Services in the Services table. You will run a query, analyze the output, and take action to identify ownership for any unowned items.

Required tasks

Option 1:

Install CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard from the ServiceNow App Store

Navigate to the CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard module in the left navigation menu

Select the Best Practices tab

Select the Services Missing Owners report to view a list of services CIs that are missing owners If you see a count of zero then this playbook is not applicable to you.

Option 2:

Engage the change management processes appropriate for your organization to do the following

Ensure that you are logged in the target instance with ServiceNow admin role

Download the Services With No Owners update set from the GetWell instance

Import the update set into your instance

Preview the update set

Commit the update set

Navigate to the list view of reports by entering sys_report.filter in the Filter navigator or navigate to the Reports view using the left hand Application navigator menu via either Configuration > CMDB Reports or Reports > View / Run

Search for the "CMDB Services Without Owner" report and open it. This report returns all Services with unpopulated Service owner fields. These include Business Services, Service Offerings, Application Services, Technical Services, and Technical Service Offerings

Example

Click "Run" to see the list of Business Services, Service Offerings, Application Services, Technical Services, and Technical Service Offerings with unpopulated Owned by "owned_by" fields

Example

Play 2 - Fix Data

What this Play is about

You will identify and document the appropriate Service owner for each of the various Service types in the report generated from Play 1

Required tasks

Identify and confirm the appropriate business owner of each Service from your organization for each Service

Select any combination of the options below to populate the Service "owned_by" fields

Manually

Navigate to the report or to Configuration > Services

Click the white space in the Service's Owned by (owned_by) field just right of the value "(empty)" to display the Users search modal

Either enter the Service owner's User name in the blank modal field or click the magnifying glass to display the list of Users and select one

Click the green check mark just to the right to save your selection

Example

Follow GetWell Knowledge Article KB0830072 to export Service records into an Excel spreadsheet template, modify the Owned_by (owned_by) attributes in the template, and then import the records back into your instance

Service Mapping

Verification Step

Repeat the relevant parts of Play 1 Analyze Existing Data. If the report displays zero records, you have reconciled all Services and Service owners; otherwise, repeat Play 2 Fix Existing Data.

Play 3: Govern Data

Establish policies, operating procedure, and controls to prevent future creation of Services without proper owner information

Required tasks

Wrap change management processes around Service creation

Consider making the owned_by field mandatory for any newly created Service or updates

Set up a periodic data certification process for the Service owners to validate and update Service information

Document an internal policy that prevents the creation of Services without approval from a qualified person or team

It is recommended that the CMDB owner, in partnership with the Service Owner, approve any new Services applications in alignment with business requirements

Institute a code review process that watches for ownerless Services in Update Sets

Regularly review Configuration Management Database (CMDB) release notes for announcement of NOW platform changes

Set up a periodic data certification process for the Service owners to validate and update Service information

Congratulations You have completed this Get Well Playbook.