hello and welcome to the service Ducks podcast I hum co-host James downs and I'm Rush here and we're here to chat about all things servicenow everyday life as a servicenow consultant new features implementation successes and perhaps more entertaining when it doesn't go quite so well [Applause] hello and welcome back to another episode of service Ducks podcast so today we are going to be talking about csdm so what's that common Services data model we're going to be talking about that and what's the point why bother with csdm but before we do that let's find out um what we've been up to James talk to us what have you been doing well it's been it's been a little while um I think we've had the we had the Christmas period and New Year um do you know what people don't know when we record these do they no no they don't know even though we had one come out in the fourth you know it's a little you know a little in secret we had that ready before Christmas so this is our first recording for Christmas yes yeah if we were organized last year true but I don't know many people who had gone get through got through the Christmas period without being sick so my whole family was sick all the way through till New Year yeah I'd agree with that everyone I know apart from me luckily I escaped it but no everyone I know um has unfortunately been ill yeah so I think you're right yeah so other than being ill my big things really was about what's happening this year so um you know I've got a couple events coming up which um which I can I guess share um not too not too exciting but um well one thing is that obviously we I think we all know we're we're into we're into running and um last year I did my very first half marathon which I nearly you did pulled over and died afterwards yeah well that's part of the course of it yeah exactly yeah so this time I've got another one booked from May the great Manchester run um sorry I've got a little bit of a little bit of a program leading up to it and um yeah very much looking forward to trying out making it through um and uh yeah being able to feel my legs afterwards that'd be quite are you following it are you following like a training plan for that one yeah well my own kind of schedule uh together yeah exactly yeah yeah whatever you find out on YouTube some very good obviously channels out there yeah yeah hints and tips from some of them shared by yourself of course so I too died on my um half marathon I have lived the pain yes yes it is definitely that's why I don't do them anymore no 10K seems to be the nice distance where you can actually enjoy your run yeah absolutely I guess the other news really is um uh more on a professional level I guess is that I'm not a professional people don't come here for professionally come here for blabber yeah Cristiano Ronaldo yeah come on man united Thief did it um yeah so I'm recording a um a video series to do with no code so I know you're uh I was gonna say you're Pro no code uh the difference to this no code series as you could probably presume it's building a custom map using App engine Studio but all the requirements will come from chat GPT so you're asking you almost have your kind of business user in front of you being chat GPT who's generating your stories generating your business requirements and objectives and things like that so that's what makes it a little bit different a little bit fun yes interesting so for those of you who've been under a rock for the last two months you may not have heard of chat GPT or may not understand what it is all I would say is service nerd channel YouTube that's mine um I did do a video on it explains what it is and kind of puts a little bit of servicenow Source on top but essentially it's an AI chat body type thing that you can ask questions and it Converses with you in kind of a human type way um I think that's all we're going to mention on that we'll mention something at the end actually something potentially quite exciting um yeah that's all we'll go into on that at the moment I think because we could create a podcast series just on that I think absolutely yep very exciting so what else what else what else well other other than that we've got um I've managed to get tickets to the Silverstone British Grand Prix in July um so that's that's gonna be really exciting tickets in the grandstands that is exciting but he's he's a more exciting question do you know do you say Silverstone or Silverstone oh [Laughter] unconsciously I just say Silverstone if you're not based in the UK you may not know what we're talking about it's it's a race circuit um but it's one of those stupid English things that you kind of spell one way and perhaps pronounce another way I always say Silverstone I may be wrong yeah I don't think there is a right or wrong anyway we're waffling we're waffling we're digressing yeah so what what have you been up to Russian what's your 2023 plans oh my god um let's not go through all my goals for 2023 I've got loads um but uh singing on the running theme I too have an event coming up in fact mind's coming up on Sunday and it is a horrible 5K um I actually know the circuit and it's mainly uphill for the first 2K no um it's horrible I'm not looking forward to it and we're going through a really cold snap in the UK at the minute yeah um and it's freezing out there and if you're not inside the UK you may think what what we're classing as freezing is just like t-shirt weather but it's cold and I hate it and I I just don't want to go but I'm going to do it anyway because it sets my time for the year and this week I and it sounds like a stand up this doesn't it what have you been up to this week what have you got coming up um this week I have been fiddling around with UI buildum and the service operations workspace but are you than me right and I'm gonna have a little rant now right yeah come on so I know about it obviously I've always needed to use case to play with it right many new things it's not new but many things with servicenow you want a use case to go fiddle with it you need to get your hand dirty you know what I mean um and I've got that at the minute and low coded ain't I I don't I don't care what they say and you mentioned low code Apple whatever yep from the stuff that okay the customer's asking to do you know you push back and you ask the questions why what are you trying to achieve but sometimes code is unavoidable but as much as I'm having a little bit of a rant about it and it is quite clunky I've noticed when you save stuff you have to save it about or refresh about four times for it to actually um show on screen a bit annoy but it's given me an opportunity to understand the architecture behind it which is great so I now know more than I did and um do I like it I do like it actually does some funky stuff um and I'm quite pleased it allows me to get my hands dirty with some code as well yeah I heard all the Grapevine it is a great line isn't that a grapevine apparently on the rumor mill yeah um that UI Builders getting some kind of facelift I don't know if it's just enhancements to it or a complete replacement and you say that out loud or do we have to do some kind of we will Preamble Safe Harbor notice um it's a rumor everybody if you if if you haven't played with it yet not you but anyone that's listened to this you haven't played with UI Builder yet I would just say get yourself a use case to have a play with get yourself a good use case to have a play with and don't make it something that is never going to be happen so how many times you've been in a situation where the customer looks and goes yeah I'll have that it's always I'll have that but actually can you put like that moon on top of the stick with some flashy lights on top for me so get one of those scenarios and and get yourself um get yourself a reason to have a play so that's what I've been doing that's me I think enough enough waffle let's give the people um something that actually turned up for given that the title um is CSD and what's the point csdm common service data model um what is the point so gone then James um in fact I'll tell you what let's flip this this kind of format slightly on his head so tell us what servicenow deems it's what is the cfcm you're allowed to read off a screen for this if you want to but what is what a servicenow tell us the csdm is well servicenow tells us that well actually if you have a look at the the likes of the white papers and you know documents out there what you're going to find is huge essays yeah exactly you can find such huge descriptions of what csdm is and I think that's partly its problem what servicenow will describe it is is obviously a split of common service and data model so you know a standard this is my quoting now a standard and shared set of service related definitions across our products on platform and the data model bit being a CMD framework across our products and platform that will enable support and multiple configuration strategies now I have a completely different explanation yeah it really does it really does okay so let's cut through that rubbish yeah so my explanation of what cstm is and I think this is real important to when you're having conversations with customers as well because they also don't want to hear all the rubbish and understand it and yeah they just want layman's terms what is it how we're going to benefit from it I think customers are wise to the marketing Guff I know they are because I've been in that situation where they have said to me I don't want the sales pitch right or the marketing Spiel yeah and I think you're right from when csdn came in into fruition a lot of customers I spoke to it's like great we've listened to the the slide deck we've watched the service now videos but we still don't get it talk to us normally exactly so yeah go on yeah I think a lot about csdm is conversations um my explanation of it is a very much cut down version of it so csdm is guidelines or a framework could call it that standardizes data structures and relationships in servicenow that's it yes yes I'd go with that I'd go for your explanation yeah but mine mine is just making sure things are in the right place I think when I asked a couple weeks it tells you where to put stuff tells you where to put stuff it's a is that to simplify the way data is stored and make it easier and and give you some guidelines because I think when servicenow um first came out and for many many years we had a cmdb and I hope if you're listening to this you already understand what cmdb is otherwise this first kind of 15 minutes has been utterly pointless but when it first came out the the the csdm sorry the cmda B was almost like a data store right we know it is a bit of a data store but there wasn't any guidelines of service now on how to use it so how many times have you been a customer where you've you've kind of you've put in relationships not really understanding because you don't come from an infrastructure background or a configuration managing background and you put in relationships between entities um application perfect example the class the cmdb application class straight away five years ago if someone said to you an application class in the cmdb what would you say Microsoft's office you'd say something like that yeah exactly um I don't know um and an actual application that you can use audacity that we're using to do this podcast perhaps so people were putting uh data in the wrong places albeit at the time they thought it was the right places and therefore getting the the relationships incorrect because obviously you don't know what the relationships are yeah the other thing background they have assigned to that as well is that servicenow you know going back a few years was very much for you know advising customers that you can configure the platform and you know you can choose where you put stuff and you know it's just down to your you know your own customization and you know your own visibility of the tool whereas to get ultimate value from servicenow you're gonna want to try and be a bit more prescriptive and align to the way servicenow intends the data to be used yeah and I think pins together and I think they've never had that before because if we if we think about it up until a few years back it was servicenow was really um I.T focused itsm ITIL focused yes in fact itsm is probably incorrect but ITIL focused right so you see MDB with something that underpinned those Services um and again if you haven't done ITIL um if you haven't done an ideal course or got no understanding of what we're talking about then I recommend you go and do an ITIL V4 oh no I don't think it's V4 I think it's just four ITIL four I don't really like it when you say the v in front of it um but yeah it was always um its or idle focused narrative started branching out to things like field service or or um sorry customer service finance HR name some others that we didn't get within our Alphabet game back in Christmas but now they're starting that they've got to recognize a common way of modeling your services that you can use them across those different applications uh what I mean by that is if you've got a HR department that's consuming that's on the platform that's using the HR module they are using the same service model perhaps as you're using in it to create your things like outages whatever yeah against and and that allows you to have this kind of um overall Global visibility of your services across your estate and I think that's the intention absolutely yeah so it's to improve that kind of data consistency and accessibility for different sets of users and applications yeah that's it did we just give a bigger explanation than what we just said the service no one was yeah I did actually I did I said why was really simple didn't I but I was actually absolutely absolutely and that's definitely part of the challenges that comes with csdm like we say when you start having these conversations from my experience anyway with service now customers they really struggle to grasp the you know the definitions and you know what is a service what is an application oh you've got all these relationships and it's just all too much and obviously this is where servicenow is introduced like a maturity model um and obviously steps that you can follow to you know do bit by bit and just make sure that you're on that journey of slowly improving your cmdb and you know relationships to each other um but obviously this is this is still a really complex uh thing for them to take on it's not going to happen overnight either so you're not gonna um achieve a mature seem DB uh overnight it's going to be something that's going to take time it needs something needs to be something that is Road mapped and it needs to have the right people involved which is probably the biggest takeaway I could mention is csdm isn't a new thing by the way the concepts from csdm is something that existed way back even pre 2018 when service now brought this in these were all kind of definitions and things that your Enterprise Architects if you're not if you're lucky enough to have some of those would know some of the you know some of the concepts and things flying around csdm already it's just that servicenow has dressed us up as csdm and you know you'll see similar Concepts come in uh togaf and it for it for example right okay so you mentioned maturity a minute ago before you went on a rant about Architects you're An Architect by the way I I couldn't think about those as well what if so so do you just is it something so we've explained what it is and gonna allow a little bit of a rant about csdm um but is it something you just turn on do you just come into the application is there a csdm application do you just come in and go toggle button on I'm done and walk away is it and I think you alluded to this before um it's not something you do overnight so I'm assuming it's not a toggle one um so is it a road marketing exercise if so where do you start csdm it sounds there might be people listening to this they've come to this and gone oh that looks like something that might help meet in my csdm journey so we've prattled on about what it is but how do I how do you get on that that Journey what do you do yeah so obviously the service now answer is to follow the maturity model like you mentioned and yes there is there is some plugins that are going to help you there is some uh data foundations uh dashboards which will show you the maturity model which goes from a you know setting up the likes of your foundational data to a like crawl walk run fly model storage marketing speak again I know I know and what I would advise in that is not all of the little segments you know within the cfcm model is going to apply to the business that you're talking to so following that maturity model may not necessarily make sense so again my advice against this is yes you can turn on these plugins and it may help you start to at least think about I will have the conversations about implementing csdm but you need to focus on the things that make sense to you is my advice focus on maybe Business Services you have an idea about those in which case yes let's start with that as long as you're having the conversations and you're starting to build towards this bigger picture and I'm sure you know the picture I'm talking about about showing the different cstm domains in about build and sell and Technical Services yeah the bigger picture that when you show it to customers are like whoa this is just like spaghetti yeah that's a good good point there's there's a model um csdm4.0 if that's a funny thing on that when csdm4.0 came on I watched the service now or I listened to the service now presentation on it and it was a woman um and she was American and she kept saying um csdm fordado for about half a day I thought there was something I was like what's for dad though give their releases names yeah so csdm Ford auto is this the new version I don't know um but yeah it's 4.04.0 [Laughter] so it's just completely alienated our us audience yeah yeah good job um what you're saying is is you mentioned the um the stages so servicenow not only are we saying um service now are saying this is what csdm is yeah and giving their marketing explanation they've also done a nice um a nice kind of project Journey marketing job as well because they're telling us we've got different stages like what did you mention Foundation crawl walk run and fly I don't know those at the top of my head I've just Googled it quickly I didn't know they existed um yeah but this is kind of different stages that that you should go in your project I guess in your life cycle to get a mature csdm and I think some if I'm being honest I think some organizations will never get to full maturity with csdm I think it'll be an ongoing no thing I think you'll get to run perhaps come back to crawl um and what it and what it says we'll put some links in in the description I think we've got such a thing in a podcast um but it says in each one of those kind of um stages that's what I'm going to call them any of those stages they recommend what to concentrate on so for example do you concentrate on Business Services in uh walk for example or Technical Services and linking those to the CIS in perhaps crawl Foundation what's that well that's got to be getting all your CIS in the right place right and then the rest has got to be um relationship so it does kind of set out that so it's very very helpful in terms of how we're doing that um how you manage that that Journey okay so we we've we've talked about what csdm we've talked about how to get started with it or or at least what's the journey to csdm Nirvana how do you migrate across I say migrate but how do you you come up with your project what kind of techy tools what kind of nerdery have we got to migrate over to csdm you've already got your cmdb stuff in place and you've now figured out oh Christ it's in the wrong place how do you migrate along what would you say from my perspective there's there is there is a few things in there that can help you um and again this is going to come from conversations as well because okay so you may have for example and a good example because this is a recent one that um I had a customer who had as you say they had their seemed to be populated as many do through like a discovery tool maybe bringing in you know um their their devices on a on a you know daily basis and they manually manage their what they would call services but in the generic Services table so not necessarily in the correct tables for csdm to start properly managing application services and then obviously this is yeah that Old Chestnut so you'll come across this a lot yeah and yes there are a few tools and nerdry out there that you can convert your services to the right version of application services to support that csdm model what I would um urge is caution in just understanding what that means because when you do that conversion it depends whether you're you have a look like the likes of an itom license so do you have service mapping do you intend to manage your services through service mapping in that route do you tend to do it through tag Based Services or any other route maybe still manual but it needs to be in the right tables so there's still a few choices and things conversations that need to happen and requirements Gathering to understand especially how these things will be managed to understand how things will fit together and what the right tables should be so I think yes there's not a one button I'm gonna say there's not a one button that says let's all migrate to csdm and it all goes in the right tables it needs to be dealt with almost on a singular basis yeah I think I think that's interesting because that's kind of um similar and feeds into so what I was going to say really because I I think first and foremost I often try and think of these things as if this is my platform if I own the platform what would I do right so I think first and foremost I'd understand the data I've currently got is it value is it valid is it valuable do I want to maintain it because a lot of cmdb you just got a lot of Guff in there that doesn't get mad it doesn't get maintained and you can just wipe off anyway so I maybe think about that first anything that is valuable I'd back up if I could but that's via spreadsheets centralized database or just understanding I've got it somewhere else and I can get it back in I'd probably do that and then and then feed into what you were saying before is is look at these are the things I care about these are the attributes of the things that I care about and now are they in the right place yeah and if they're not in the right place this is the right place to put them and have I got the Mandatory Action we used to put them in those tables because um we all know when you move um CIS into the into the different tables all classes I should have mentioned that before um yeah tables classes same um you've got different attributes per class haven't you so you've got different mandatory requirements perhaps yeah absolutely yeah so I'd look at that um and then I'd look at the dependencies between those classes that I'm interested in yeah and what I would do in a nutshell what I would add as well is it's not just about the actual CI classes themselves it's even the importance is also on the relationships so it's not just about populating Ci's and making sure it's in the right class it is it's all about data about data and the relationships between them and make sure the right relationships are there because you want the right bigger picture to show you know a lot of the new functionality that's going to come out with servicenow is going to be against these particular relationships that they've advised or against these particular classes so just um I'm conscious of time just before we we wrap up on this I've got one more question around csdm right so we've talked about we've discussed what is csdm yeah we've discussed what the journey is to becoming mature in CS team haven't we we've discussed around kind of hints and tips around the techie nerdery stuff to to get us on that Journey so who cares right so what so so all the all we're talking about right at the minute is we're talking about some data or the relationship relationships between that data in service now and it's a common service to data model it's all great yeah what does that mean how can we consume it how do we see it in the platform how can I physically see and go Ah that's part of the csdm what does it mean yeah so what do you actually get out of the what's the benefits what yeah how can you realize value from it so let's just think about it from a igsm perspective I think what most of us are our favor of igsm yeah and let's say yep right we've done so much work in getting our theme to be aligned we've got our services in place fantastic everything all links up nicely what does it actually mean okay so if you think from the the benefits that you can get from that are the likes of change management for example so if you have a particular CI which is um obviously it's maybe been monitored and there's some form of outage let's say you need to create a change or incident off the back of that to understand its impact so understanding its impact to the likes of the services you're able to be able to understand uh deeper in terms of where the root cause is you're able to report deeper on the performance of these Services because of their linkage back from all these relationships so you're able to get true service level reporting you're able to get a reduction in tickets because you're able to um you know more accurately describe incidents and changes a reduction in the meantime to resolve that's just a few things that comes off the top of my head you're able to just work more efficiently okay that's good so I think I think bits that I would add to that and I'm keeping in mind that csdm is a cross-platform so I I'm kind of leaning more towards you've got HR you've got Finance there you've got itsm as well what benefits do I get across those platforms well I would get oh you get total cost of ownership wouldn't you oh there's a proper management but you get you get the total cost of that service because that service is coming across all those different um functions so Finance HR it um so I would say yeah you've got you've got complete holistic visibility of your service across the organization I would say that yeah big plus yeah I would also say if you wanted to purchase a new product from service now so let's say they came out with the new I don't know bus scheduling app okay and you bought that that would be um using the common service data model as well right so if you're starting to adopt it now you'd be ready to go with that you wouldn't buy a new product telecom's perfect example you wouldn't buy a new product from servicenow and then go oh no we've got to restructure ourselves we have to redo all this yeah yeah and I think that's part of the major benefit for servicenow themselves it allows them to be more Dynamic and release projects uh projects products at speed that speed quickly yeah um and I and I think that's one of the keys things for me yes yes so we're saying you can determine how well an Enterprise application is performing you can identify um affected Services quickly through outage reduction sort of thing consistent reporting and your kind of future proofing yourself for any new products coming in the fact that you don't need to redo what you've already done yes yeah I'd go with that I'll go with that so so in order to to kind of wrap things up here we waffled on a bit about um csdm to answer the original question James csdm what is the point and you're not allowed to Waffle on concise adopting the csdm in servicenow maximizes platform value through improved data consistency cross-platform service performance visibility and scalability for new products all right no no I'll go with that my I was going to give you two words manageability and scalability yeah so human should scale as well then yeah I think I'm going to be I wanted to make sure I had that in there yeah yeah you're also is much more concise than mine yeah yeah what people don't know they listen to me on this podcast but I don't tend to Waffle much but you wouldn't think that you proved yourself wrong yeah I know the rubbish I actually talk on this okay so um we mentioned at the start around chat GPT we talked a little bit about that and I part that to the end um because I I wanted to mention it towards the end so I think what we should tell um people James is on the next uh podcast hopefully uh we'll be lining up someone to talk to us about chat GPT um this person has been on all over LinkedIn he's also got an integration with servicenow so that's going to be really interesting to learn more about so my name is James Downs I'm Rush here there's a business tax that's all for today's podcast thank you for listening and if you want to get your question answered by the service Ducks get in touch through talk to the doc at service hyphenducks.com or just use one of the links below [Music] [Applause]