welcome everybody to our first Digital Services Forum meeting of the year today we're going to talk about we're going to jump right into modeling for those of you that were on the call the end of last year we're talking about three focusing on three areas this year mostly we're not going to stick to that completely but we want to stick with modeling the operating model and then anything around AI that we can bring you that's new so today the big focus is going to be on modeling and um we'll go through what that is in a few minutes i' just like to give an intro here in the beginning for anybody that's new uh if today's your first time we like to keep a really active chat and Charles is on the call Charles and I are co-owners of the U Digital Services Forum along with two others on our team and we go through the chat and we make sure that we any action items that we take out of there so please use the chat and especially if it's your first time to introduce yourself so we know where you where you're from and what you're here for okay now what I what I will put in the chat and right after I get done here we'll let some more people come in is I'll go ahead and put in this link to our community and this is the best way if you just keep that one link it'll get you to everything so you you'll go to a page that's about the Digital Services forum and then it'll give you the the zoom meeting it'll give you the link to the community so that you have the blogs where we put all the content that we share on these calls and then it'll give you the YouTube playlist and then it'll give you a link to ask for access to our instance so if you do want to come into our instance which we use to do demos uh I will give you an admin account if you just send me an email and when you click on the link that I I send you'll be able to see where you can you can ask for that admin account so we tried to get everything on one page so that you're not hunting and pecking for emails all over the place also if I've ever sent you an email on the bottom of my on the bottom in my signature block I have a link to that same page so this lets you do all of that from that one [Music] spot without further Ado we'll get into our agenda So today we're gonna have Mary's gonna kick us off she's our principal portfolio manager and she's firsttime speaker she's been definitely involved in some of the um a lot of the content we got from Mary so she's been involved with the group before but this is her first time speaking I think it is right Mary yeah it is awesome well we're g to we're going to definitely tap her more this year on a lot of the stuff that I shared when I did the roadmap for cmdb was all Mary's material and then we have Charles who you all heard from before Charles is our one of our co-hosts so he'll be definitely taking us through how he's used some models on some of his accounts in the past but before I hand it off to Mary I just want to tell you two quick things I'm working on the backlog so some of you uh some of you will get emails from me and I know Tina thank you for uh accepting so Tina will be speaking on strategic planning along with one of our product managers and then we're also teeing up something I have I started to write it here but on value streams so we're going to do a meeting on value streams where we have an art of the possible and then we have something like a really basic getting started how can I get started with those value stream tables then I reached out to a couple other of you from the um again from the meeting notes that um Richard I reached out to you about some topics around microservices so we're planning our content for q1 so if you do get emails from Charles or I it's probably about that probably about the content with with that I'll hand it over to Mary and I think Mary you're just gonna take over the screen share right yes I am all right and welcome looking forward to your presentation all right all right so today's topic is going to be um how product models within the csdm that foundational piece of data um works with uh Records that are in the cmdb and how that usages across the service now platform for those that don't know me I'm Mary vanata I'm a principal portfolio manager of itom and I also do c Tob csdm my function here is to provide leading practices for implementation I have been doing implementations with service now for at least five years I worked as a customer and then as a consultant and now I'm here sharing my experience with you here at service now um our leading practices group uh updates and maintains the content that you see and now create uh and now create is as anybody knows if they've ever gone to it it's to the behind the now learning um platform I have about nine years of experience in the service now ecosystem again starting as a customer uh and I'm located in witto Kansas so that's a little bit about me I've been in it for actually 25 years so anything I talk about I've pretty much um touch um in a on a day-to-day basis so let's today's um Talk we're just going to talk about how important that product model is and I think it's probably one of those things especially back early when I started with service now was a forgotten piece of data like if we didn't know where the data went we created a custom table so we really want to bring um out to all of all of our customers how important the product model is and for those that don't know it's a specific version um or configuration of a product we're all very familiar with this in our own personal lives whether we buy a Ford um Escape or we buy a uh Honda um or a a Toyota Camry those are different products and product models so it defines whether the product is tracked as an asset a Ci or both the product model is captured both on the configuration and asset record and is maintained in the product catalog but it's also captured in many other CM seem to be records which we will talk about today so some of the capabilities um that I'm speaking about today depend upon whether APM Sam or Sam Pro is licensed and some capabilities like manage the technology features and TPM are not available without um a license of some of those other products so you were all familiar with the common service data model I'm just going to call out this is the part that we're talking about today the product model table um it again just shows that this is a very foundational um data point and I like to actually kind of call it the glue that holds a lot of the um records within the csdm model together so the product model uses are you know are demonstrated here and I think you know as I said product models exist in our daily lives they exist in every organization you just need to think of the different models of laptops different versions of software or applications and maybe have different service models that you offer your um if you're a customer service management you have different service models you may be offering your customers um so when you have a new product model typically a new version of software has been introduced into the environment um we want to talk about that being here in the ideation stage um here in the ideation stage customers may make it you know or employees may make a demand um to replace a piece of software they um want to go with a new version a new model maybe a new product Al together and then you know that goes in through your project and it begins to you know in that design mode or even rationalization mode um become a business application within your organization we're going to use agile and the sdlc comp components of devops to build out the the new application and get it deployed into the organization in its operational status we're looking at the application services and then any of the business services or Technical Services um so that we can perform service operations and then the end of life and even beginning of Life is within the asset and product um management app uh portfolios so here um we want to talk about the model data hierarchy um product models represent a set of products so we have application models we have software models hardware and consumable models service models contract and facility models and I think one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this is I was first working as a um senior TC in a consultancy and one of the other senior TC's was building out a service catalog and he didn't know how to build out all the applications that they would need service catalog items on what did he do he was a developer he created a custom table because he didn't he was not aware of that the software and application model tables is where we want to kind of keep that data and so then later on when that customer came back to us to implement software Asset Management we didn't have any product models because they at the time were doing things in a very manual um in a manual manner so the model category um configuration determines that if the service now platform creates an asset from a CI and if so what class is that asset that asset again is the hardware software consumable and there's different types there's physical types logical types documentation types there's different sources that could be coming from internal teams vendors um there's a different could be a different product owner and team um especially if you're a product Centric it and then uh critical for life cycle management from idea as I showed early from idea to digital product and service so I know John has spoke a lot on this forum about digital product management and this is the foundation for that if you don't have the data in the right place here um digital product management is not going to be um as productive or as valuable as you'd like it to be so um if you have a product model that is not in represented in an Enterprise Asset Management content service yet you haven't created it yet you can create a custom product model and this is found where you to do that you can do that in your Enterprise asset workspace um and under the normalization tab so an example uh for consumable model there's a lot of use cases across the platform and one I'd like to call out for the healthcare industry the of people may not be aware of is the medication product model is an extended table from the seem to be consumable product table so that's where even our medical application ties into this so again we're we're really emphasizing how important um some of these um product model classifications are and again here's a standard um diagram here that I think could resonate with most people on it you have a Windows Server what model is that server and then um what that helps with is knowing when we need to deprecate that server especially if it's a one that's a virtualization server running a lot of other servers on it we need to stay up to date with those models so that we can um deprecate it and retire it um in a timely manner any questions so far if you do just drop them in the chat and we can we can answer them as we [Music] go quite a bu today yeah hopefully this is an interesting topic and I'm not just boring them to sleep here so every CI and asset should reference the product model uh again those types are physical logical documents um it's critical again for the life life cycle management and so this is where in the CI class manager you know there's you can add attributes to those um model ID and the the model ID filled like on a server record on an application service record on a business application all reference that model ID attribute okay in San Diego plus it automatically creates a product model for logical CIS and references them customers who are migrating from a product Centric management to get a head start on transition for logical types don't have to create them manually and a mod logical product model um that we're all very familiar with with csdm or the business services Technical Services business applications service offerings all have logical product m in other words they cannot be discovered they have to manually have somebody that's maintaining those models as part of their day-to-day work and their work being done within site of service now we've got a question can you talk about the relationship between application hyphen software model and how it might also relate to the service model yes we we actually get into that a little bit deeper into the presentation if I don't answer your question and I I'll be more than happy to take some time with you after so the product Model Management record again I think this is one of the most forgotten records it's there if you're not using an automated means um uh to populate it it really does require when you're setting up if you're you know new to service now your Greenfield make sure somebody's tracking the models um that because you will later use that with Hardware ma um Asset Management you'll use it in the service catalog software asset I know from my experience a lot of customers started out with itsm they said yeah we want the service catalog right build out because that was cool it it really showed that you did something when we have all these cool service catalog records but in that process if they didn't have Discovery and they really hadn't built out complete seem to be the product model table was forgotten and this helps really with that software off you know obsolescence and it also helps with knowing who manag those very you know various products so one of the things that we um want to call out is asset tracking strategy it says leave to category is synchronizes with Asset Management what's out of box typically works we we've had customers shut that off or think that they wanted to have a requirement and then later on didn't realize that out of box it works um virtual assets you can actually say on a virtual asset that you do not want it to create a um asset inside of um Hardware Asset Management because a virtual server is not a hardware asset even though there's a financial component to it sometimes they're not alive long enough to even track for more than if a server's up for four hours there's no asset to that so um that will override the model category um uh creation of those virtual assets you discover so yeah this is all of the different product use cases for this prod product Model Management record and we recommend best practices leading practices team you know really recommends that you have somebody managing these records in the platform so again like I said when you create a CI it would create a hardware um like computer it would create a hardware asset likewise if you create a hardware inside of asset management it would create a a CI you want to make sure for leading practices that your um your organization is going out on a regular basis to the store app or through the plugins and updating your cic class models um because we are consistently adding new class models that extend the C to be class hierarchy and I just want to say typically you shouldn't be creating models manually and um just as we really don't recommend you know you might have a if if you're a very small organization and you have somebody who wants to keep up the records for the same to be they also need to be up dating the product model records as well there are many as I said data points across the platform that interconnect and they create that thread in their digital fabric so missing and inaccurate data leads to holes in that fabric um so by not knowing what products you have you may have a server or some software that's needing to be deprecated and it causes an outage so automated model creation are best um created first with an external automated population such as Discovery service graph connectors agent client collectors um service graph connectors we have so many of them that pull in data from other tools like titanium logic monitor Splunk those kind of things so when we pull run the discovery goes through the mid server as part of what we call the um identification exploration phases it obtains those hard those models of hardware and software and it populates the C Tob so if you run Discovery you populate a server you're going to see that model ID populated what you're not going to see is who owns that product model you're not going to see some of that logical data that um requires human knowledges and processes to populate and then of course the service graph connectors do the same way and then there's a piece where you normalize that data because if you have application packaging within your organization somebody could have packaged a Microsoft product or um some other Adobe product and used Adobe Inc versus Adobe so when you get into doing software Asset Management it's really important that we've normalized on the manufacturer's name and there is a process for doing that which we won't actually cover today it's out on the doc site um so product Model Management life cycle stages and Status so on that record it looks at application software hardware and contract model and these are the life cycle stages that are on that um record it might be under evaluation this is where you're deciding if you want to purchase this new software and then it could you know be in the pilot stage once it's in the pilot stage and your organization has decided to to invest in this and build it out the um stage is design and the status is build then it moves into now we deployed it for our organization goes into an operational and now we're using it and then as we decide we want to deprecate that ver maybe want to deprecate a model go to a new version um we would then retire or it may be like a server it we would sell that um at the end of light so let's talk a little more about this inside of application portfolio management specifically and I want to point this out because a lot of customers may have been on service now way before Kingston and if so and they're just now thinking about doing APM they're going to see the software model Rec um attribute here you need to remove that and reconfigure it and add the model ID attribute um to the record um and that's so that the data points are all connecting um this was due to we didn't it doesn't remove when you upgrade because there are organizations that may have been using that attribute maybe they did deploy APM so if you're not getting the connection you need that may be something to look for there so um um here the model ID um is is when it's created here it's in the application product model table and some some more I'll get into a little bit what's the difference between an application product model versus a software model um and now this is autocreated in Vancouver so if you are not on Vancouver and you are adding a model ID to your business application record you will have to click here click new create a new one um and add it manually um then if if you're on Vancouver and you use a model ID you type it in and it automatically up puts that information on the application product model table um if you're doing TPM um techn tech tech tracking your Tech Deb um the technology reference model um for example defines all standards for software applications that are used in your um organization so you can Define the software and the software versions that you want to be using in product and you can add new software products to the to that library and approve or reject requests by other stakeholders so if you want to ass associate service models to a software model without the activation of S pro then you will manually need to create that connection however to do that you can click if you want to do it automated and you have um software Asset Management Pro you can just click manage technology portfolio um or manage technology models any questions on that okay I can't see the chat so if if um you just wan to yes so there was a comment we can't use Discovery so we have to create them manually and then another comment uh data normalization is the challenging piece in my experience we'll routinely get the duplications and then I put a a sort of a reply in but I think it's only a half reply of of product models are logical Concepts that they software or Hardware on a shelf available to buy as opposed to your more operational CIS that the specific like here's a specific server that's a specific um serial number of a specific model and um so so how would you address the normalization piece you talked like earlier um automate using automation or something to to handle the the population of the product models table right so if you're not using Discovery are you automatically populating your cmdb with Ser service craft and agent client collector visibility um are two good other options to automate um of course we have rest apis that you can connect and bring in data from another third part party software but if you're manually populating your cmdb that's just another part of it I I remember when I was a server administrator and we we were this is the days before virtualization or virtualization was just coming on on board we had a spreadsheet and we knew when our Dell yeah I think they were our S10s you know and we we were aware and and we had looked at the new models every year like desktops we we had I was working for an organization that had 400 desktops and we would evaluate do we want to go to IBM or HP do we want the next version of HP which version did we want and so then you are manually updating that you have to then when you're doing manual work you're going to have to make sure you have some naming standards which should help if you're not if you're not automated and you're manually populating the product model table then it behooves you to have some processes and procedures around um naming standards so that you don't have to mess with the data normalization but if you then turn it on and what's being found in the um environment you know is Microsoft versus Microsoft Inc um yeah the data normalization isn't an easy process but it is a necessary process and to take the time to clean up that data there's another comment here about uh what might be the source for application models does Vancouver create app models to mirr uh business apps and I guess I'll comment here I would be highly suspicious of miroring app models on business apps they're not the same thing one is software that's available to purchase or use the other is your specific instance of software that might be based on that software to use but I can have multiple instances of it so if you're mirroring them if you're creating sort of a one one between them um first of all that's the reason why there's two Separate Tables is they're not one to one second is you're going to create a big data mess as you try and figure out like I've got five instances of SharePoint I don't have necessarily five different models of SharePoint that that's kind of distinguish there the way I like to think about it is the application product model says this is the thing we have like if if you go down a grocery store this is where the canned food is it's canned food but the various versions of canned food are different so that's where that versioning piece that software model fits inside so you can have saps for Hannah Erp and I'm not sure what version model they're on so forgive me but if you have five doto four doto in your environment in a real world experience I can share with you is a large manufacturer out of Indianapolis if you're on the phone hey I might you might recognize me um I they had Engineers that used mat lab and and think about AutoCAD and ktia this usually always happens one group of ver Engineers want to use you know ktia 4.0 and another vers set of Engineers want to use version 5 .0 your your application product model is going to be ktia but your software versions are going to be 4.0 and 5.0 and then I'll show you how that ties in to the product model table here in a little bit so if you're creating it manually you can see what happens it adds it to these model categories software business application and application service so if you do create it manually you need to add it to these model categories so a little bit about devops um this is a forward statement I I've heard that they're going to be M with devops is any customers on the call that are currently using devops if so just raise your hand and Charles could you let me know all right so devops is not a product that's used by a lot of our customers um the ones that are using it will remain supported but I don't believe they're going to be making any future upgrades to the devops product um and that's a forward looking statement um and and not necessarily to be concerned about at this point so in devops you can make it in the change workspace you can create an application tied to an application product model um to track devops configurations and changes so devop change velocity is an application that collects up all the up-to-date data that connects tools um to send plans report you know repositories and pipelines you must create an applic to enable traceability for user stories commits test results and more so associating plans repositories and pipelines to an application also enables that pipeline modeling change governance and Metric reporting so um you would use the change workspace again like I said to create um that devops application record and it's stored in the devops app table so an is needed to group those plans repositories and pip pipelines okay so now technology portfolio management this is where you're going to see us see that csdm data um in technology portfolio management this organization has saps for Hannah they have it um deployed in two locations one in the US and then one in Japan and they have a separate application service because in Japan it displays in Japanese and so therefore they would have separate service offerings that support those different application services and then of course the one in um the US uses um the version 2021 and the software model 2020 is still used in Japan we could actually say in a real world instance maybe they're looking to upgrade now and they're in the middle of upgrading they upgraded the US first and they're going to update um Japan next but this gives the um you know says hey this this software may be needing to be updated then you have your software models and sa S4 Hannah um can be ran on Enterprise server 15 or Enterprise server 12 this is getting to end of life it's starting to let the customer know that they may need to have a demand and a project to um replace those servers and then whatever Hardware model is being used um for that so when that Hardware um reaches into life it's left it's less performant so it can lead to degration and outages so TPM enables you to create demands or products to address those pending life um end of life situations in advance so we find product models within the agile um the story we talked a little bit about how that ties in from devops but there's that product model there and I'm always kind of surprised that we have a product model but it's it's not being use consistently across the platform and then we wonder why we're not getting value out of the um platform it's because you got different teams we have different teams saying this is what the product models are and and and PPM we've got different teams saying this is what the product models are inide the service catalog got some customers using customer T Custom tables um so here this just points to to the cmdb model list and then um the model category equals software that way you get that software version there so the application service um if you don't have it you need to add the model ID and this is where you're going to dictate when you create an application service just like I said if you have different installations across your organization you're going to have different application Services because an application service again is dep dependent upon the deployed version of that software and so this is where you're going to track that software model right here on the application service that way when it is related back up to the business and it is and it consumes by consumes relationship the business application can consume information about how well this application's performing is is the 2021 version performing as well as we expected are we seeing still a lot of incidents around the 2020 version any questions on that okay so Asset Management where do we see the product model everybody's probably most familiar with this the product model this is that asset create an asset we want it to if it's on the configuration it item um we want to make sure that the product model is the same on the hardware also I would denote if your application if you have a onetoone like you only have one application service and you have one business application doesn't have multiple versions there is not necessarily A synchronization between the model ID so if you put it on the business application record you want to verify you want to make that part of your data verification is that the application service has the same version of software or at least it's part of the underneath that application product model sorry and that's another use case for the application product model being on the business application is that you don't have a software you don't have a a business application record for every version of software you have so here again in the software asset models you can view all the different versions you may have running in your organization or what you may have had and it may be set to inactive or that's a life cycle that way some remote location isn't left you know oh hey we never updated that location um we still see you know 2013 running um so the software model record um again everybody should know when you create a software model record it takes the publisher plus the um I think the model ID and it creates the display name um and you can do a uh kind of a a search for that the version starts with the addition is anything it's a platform and then you here you get your software product life cycles um this is where you manually track somebody can go out there online and they can see hey this is when it was generally available this is when the end of support is and somebody needs to have reports on that to know when those um models are coming to the end of support or end of life and then on the software entitlement for um software Asset Management you'll see that again here this product model it needs to tie back um to your licensing because you don't want to be paying for licenses you're not using and I I'll call you're time what's that you're at time uh so last questions for Mary if anybody wants to see the rest of this presentation you can go out to now create so that's now learning. service service-now.com now create if you hit the sign in and you're taken to now learning just toin the URL to now now create we you're noticing some issues with that and you can download um this presentation and Mary if you can stick around um in the chat there are some um great uh sort of questions and comments there that I I think you should weigh in on if you've got time Joshua asked can you get a copy of the deck as John posted earlier in the chat um they will be posted out on the Forum by Monday all right so I'm going to stop the share here and let you take over okay and why did Zoom decide to go away so I'm not no longer monitoring the uh chat um feel free to to ask questions directly um I'm going to fit this in pretty quickly uh we were scrambling on getting some topics for today but uh my topics is going to be much more generic it's going to be higher level about sort of how to think about models as opposed to specifics of the csdm or the specific of of the product model and I wrote this humorously a couple years ago for a presentation I did for a former employer I call it lie cheat and steal your way to an effective model and of course I'm not recommending lying cheating or stealing um those are just mics to to help you remember how to think about models um so first of all a little bit about me like I am an Enterprise architect I've been solution architect um I've been portfolio manager um a lot at really big companies over my career um even more than as an architect I think of myself as a modeler I'm someone that likes solving tough problems using models they're my tool of choice uh no matter uh what's um sort of problem I'm I'm going to face and in fact I had I challenged myself on this particular presentation no drawings at all um though I do have a picture of the csdm but I didn't draw anything here okay because that's my normal way of thinking is drawing so I want to start with just what is a model um and the most generic reference I got is it's a representation of a subject of interest and another one version I saw of this of a definition talked about it as an abstraction of something you're interested in and I really like that um it f and and I'll get to this when we get to the LI section A little bit more models are versions or that they're a tool you can use to think about something or to communicate something and I got some examples of model models here a map you're all familiar with like the Mercer projection and you've probably even heard how like it makes green L look too big in Africa look too small um that sort of thing um there's multiple types of maps including satellite maps their models statistical models uh those are used for all sorts of things from Finance to election projection that sort of thing written language is a model of verbal language if you think about the difference between how you speak English and how you write English they're really different things but they're related what the the written language is a representation of that verbal language you've all seen a a building architect as opposed to a software architect's model of a building that helps get the idea of here's what we're all going to try and Build Together oops I got statistical model in there twice I'll fix that um road maps a model of activity over time music notation I love this one I'm I'm a musician I'm learning several instruments right now um musical notation is a model of the music that you play and sometimes it's not even a very accurate model of the music that you're going to play I had to pull up a funny meme here um you've probably seen this out there and if any of you are musicians um the amadas cafe if you look at the uh music as it's written here and you tried to play that on an instrument what this is is the Flintstone song Flintstones meet The Flintstones um so I always just find that one amusing um weather and climate models those are different types of models so all of these are representations of something that somebody was interested in I'm going to focus specifically on architectural models for for the rest of this because that's the type I play with um meaning software architecture or Enterprise architecture models and there's a common question about models versus diagrams and the big difference between a model and a diagram or a picture is a model has a database behind it um so a diagram is basically a picture you might generate it from a model it tends to be free form um meaning there's no rules there's no syntax there's no deeper meanings sort of behind the things if you draw a square it's a square and how somebody interprets that square is up to them if we flip to an architect in a modeling tool you've got a database back end if I update a record in the database then all the representations of that record on all the diagrams are going to update instantly so if I change the name of an object I said my business application used to be called uh um service now and now it's called um carts which is an instance of service now I know at a customer um everywhere that that was referenced in every single diagram it would be updated instantly models are going to allow you to do some more sophisticated analysis than a diagram will um they tend to be based on one or more modeling standards and depending on your modeling program they may enforce syntax that means like this type of object can connect to another type of object but only in certain ways and models typically have three different ways of viewing the modeled content one will be a diagram or a picture one will be a matrix where you're showing on different axes like here's business applications in one axis and application services in other axes and show me the relationships between those and then catalogs or lists um which is the usual way that that we uh sort of view things in in service now so I'm going to start here with why you should not create a model and it's pretty simple it's when details don't matter or when the subject is Trivial modeling has a lot of overhead and so if the thing you're working on isn't really that interesting or it's not that complex don't waste your time setting up a model for it it's way too complex just draw your pictures deal with it flipping to Y model and it's the inverse of that when you want to analyze document or communicate about the model um subject so it's back to there's something you're interested in and you really want to think deeply about it you really want to document it well and you want to communicate your findings from your analysis and your documentation um to others that's the number one reason why why you would pull out modeling as a tool um also when you need to manage the details of large and complex things I get bored easily personally and if the subject's too simple I just kind of tune in out I want to work on complex things I want to work on things that are hard and models are great for allowing me to work on super complex things that I can't manage in my head or on spreadsheets or or whatever by myself the next major reason for modeling is when you need to connect multiple viewpoints where you're talking about different aspects of the same stuff in Mary's part we were talking about hardware and software product models and business applications and app services and app CIS those are all different facets of the same thing they're talking about different aspects they're connecting in different ways they simulation of of the real thing and different people are interested in them your software Asset Management people are are interested in licensing aspect of the thing your Dev team's interested in the coding version in versions of the thing and your operations team is interested in your deployed instances of those things so all model is great for connecting those multiple viewpoints and allowing them to be consistent with one another when you need traceability and rigor and also when I need continuity over time and I'm willing put in the effort to maintain it it's really not worth going down the modeling path if you're not willing to maintain models over time they're hard to maintain they take effort they help you over time they can make a lot of things easier but it's not a oneandone activity so I'm going to get to lying here and and I think this is best uh explained by the quote uh from George box here all models are wrong some models are useful he was a British statistician and he's referring to statistical models here like that are used in finance or election uh forecasting that sort of thing and this is the first part of a model that that I really want to drive home with you is every last one of them is wrong they're not real there is no 100% correct way to model anything of any type of model anywhere and by lie here I meaning since you're not 100 % truthful accurate everything that you do in a model of any type of model is going to be wrong in one or more degrees and I want you to realize that fact and set yourself free from perfectionism most people when they start getting into models their number one thing they start trying to do is be perfect with their model and this includes csdn they're trying to be perfect with how they they use all the things in the the csdm and if you start from this concept that all models are wrong and you're not trying to be right you're not trying to be 100% truthful you're going to start focusing on the useful what are you trying to do does your model help you understand that communicate that think about that in a better way related to lying I'd say here is storytelling well well let me hold off on that so what makes a useful model I'm going to say it it's when it tells its intended story to its intended audiences in a medium that they could understand I should have bolded the medium um part here too so so it's it's the three parts every model's got a story or a point that it's trying to to get across every model has an audience and every model is being expressed in a medium and how you put your effort into the model depends on which of these three you're focused f using on but I'll say the most important here is your story and your audience if you don't understand the story you're trying to tell with a model and if you don't understand your audience and if they understand how you're telling that story you're kind of wasting your time one of the hardest parts of modeling is knowing what what details to include and knowing when to stop and I'll go back to to that storytelling aspect if every model is a story then only include details that support your story relevant to your audiences break it up into digestable chunks I I'm deeply opposed to like the big massive architecture diagram I know you've all seen that's a spaghetti chart that has boxes in 15 different colors going all over the place and you sit there and you look at it like what's going on here the story got lost in that type of model it's trying to talk to too many people about too many things go back to Simplicity of messaging focus on your audience focus on the story you're telling focus on how to break that into chunks that they can understand and then stop when you've accomplished your purpose even though your modeling language might let you express other things even though you know you're not telling the entire truth of the thing you're not showing all the details that you can possibly show stop modeling when your story is told everything else is just extra detail here's our good friend csdm I was hoping to have a bit more uh discussion time on this but I'll come back to to like when I encounter a diagram like this what I'm as an architect what I'm immediately going asking myself is who is this for now fortunately this one answers that if you look all the little head icons over here all throughout so I know who my audience is it's these people and I can infer it's also people that are interested in um service now data and if I look at each one of these colored areas I can see all of those different people are associated with certain areas of this model so I'm starting to infer the story here and this is something I really hope you guys can take away from this is every time you see architecture diagrams or models start with asking yourself who's the audience what's the story that's being told so in this case the story that's being told to all of these different uh personas or roles around the edges are here are the data elements and the relationships of those data elements that help you manage your Technical Services or manage your software builds or manage your design and portfolio or sell and consume your uh Business Services you can infer that from the model that makes this a fairly effective model in the interest of time I'm going to move on to cheat um and and my next quotee here bend the rules only if you have learned them Break The Rules only if you have mastered them um modeling is hard so so one of the main things that that distinguishes a model from a diagram if you remember back is you're based on a standard when you model you're based on um a a certain sort schema syntax however you want to call it they they talk modeling languages archimate uml CML where you go down down on the list put your time in to really master and understand those languages a lot of thought from a lot of brilliant people went into making those and they're made for specific purposes and so like when you look at the csdm that is in a sense a met what they what modelers will call a meta model it's a language for how to describe CIS and the relationships to software and products and services and all the rest of that put your time into studying that put your time and understanding all of that before you start customizations but those models modeling language is the csdm are generic they're telling stories for most people they're not necessarily telling a story for your audience um you want to make sure you're paying attention to how it's supposed to be done going back to to here's the rules of the particular language or whatever you're doing but Break The Rules also known as customization with purpose to tell your own story I use the archimate modeling language a lot and one of the areas that I find it's really deficient in is talking uh business value they've got a value object but if I'm trying to talk the financial aspects of things it's not a very rich language for that so I do a fair amount of customization in my models to tell a financial story that archimate the business l language won't let me tell so that's an example of breaking the rules I'm customizing a language but I'm doing it with purpose because I need to tell the financial aspects of the story not just the technical or the business or the process another thing to remember here is the model is seldom the final medium of communication most people don't understand models if you put a model in front of them they don't know what they're seeing so especially if your audience aren't hello Architects so your model is going to help you think about things it's going to help you be consistent it's going to help you be traceable you're often going to need to translate it often into like a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation or or a talk like this um so be prepared coming back the model isn't reality it's a story you're telling about something and maybe the story is for your purposes so you understand something deeply so you can help somebody else with it the last part here is stealing um and so I've got a quote here from Pablo Picasso I nearly did a beasty boy quote but um Pas this quote from him is uh good artist copy great artist steal and the point here is stealing's involving interacting to multiple people and in in this scenario stealing ideas from other people you cannot model in isolation modeling is a Community sport um oops got it in there twice so I do a lot of models sort of for my own purpose and I've got a picture here of a Barry Sachs player named Leo P who does a lot of busing in New York subways and he's amazing he he plays amazing Sachs and he's having a lot of fun and his audience is enjoying it but he's doing that by himself it's limited in its impact when he gets together this is him on the far right right with a group of people they can do amazing things the the impact is Amplified the quality is greater I've got a link to the actual YouTube video I encourage you to watch it it's a version of funky town and and I feel good it's great song um the point here is community so if you're modeling by yourself you're going to get wrapped up in your head you're going to be reading those standards you're going to get confused about what a business app is versus an app service versus a software product all of that that we were kind of talking about in The Forum or in the chat if you've got a community you can work through that better you can share models you can share struggles you can share examples you can take examples from other people and use them in your work to help make your job you can give get and give critical feedback the important thing here is working with others modeling by itself is almost by yourself is almost never worth it it's a community effort so wrapping this up because I know we're just a tad over time um we and the Digital Services Forum talked about we're going to focus on models over this next year this is kind of my introduction to how I'm approaching that I'm wanting to start building that Community using this forum and asking deeper questions about how we model things when we model things how to do it right keep in mind you don't have to be perfect it's a story um I want to start doing that stealing part with the rest of you so uh I look forward to the rest of the year and uh thank you for attending this session we'll let you go again sorry for going just a bit over