Understanding the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) in ServiceNow
The Common Service Data Model (CSDM) serves as a unified framework that helps organizations manage and illustrate their services and related data…
This public service agency provides wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal services for approximately 2.6 million people. With roots going back to 1921, the agency supports 20 US cities, operating two treatment facilities that clean wastewater from residential, commercial, and industrial sources.
The Agency went live with ServiceNow in late 2022, but with an implementation partner that didn’t adhere to best practices, they were left with a platform that wasn’t fully optimized and in need of significant recovery work.
Initially, The Agency took these improvements on in-house. However, their small team of ServiceNow administrators was stretched thin, managing multiple systems, and lacking deep ServiceNow expertise due to insufficient training from their implementation partner. This left them overwhelmed and in need of support to quickly optimize their ServiceNow system to realize its full potential.
Using a Beyond20 ServiceNow System Administration (SNSA) package, the organization tapped into Beyond20’s expertise to provide staff augmentation around ServiceNow development and offer “over the shoulder” advisory. This approach allowed The Agency to simultaneously blow through its ServiceNow punch list and get its in-house team ramped up on the system.
Time-strapped resources working in a suboptimal system is not only a recipe for burnout–it’s an efficiency killer.
We aimed to fix that.
We did so through accelerating and completing in-progress development left undone by The Agency’s implementation partner, improving maintainability by reducing technical debt and aligning the system with best practices, building a best-practice-based service catalog, automating the release process, and upgrading the instance from Rome to Utah (without a hitch).
We continue to work through The Agency’s list of ad hoc development tasks (reducing the development backlog), and (critically!) review technical details of builds by the original implementation partner to flag and fix any lurking issues before they impact the business.
This agency has graduated from getting the functionality of an entry level tool that treats all work as tickets to the world-class Enterprise Service Management experience that ServiceNow was designed to deliver. Employee satisfaction is up, and The Agency is enjoying 50-75% gains in process efficiency.
