For many organizations, maintaining a healthy ServiceNow CMDB is an ongoing struggle. A traditional CMDB can give you a solid inventory of servers and databases, but it does not answer the question that matters most: How does this infrastructure support the business?
In our recent masterclass, Maxime Carrier, ITOM Practice Lead at Ateko, and Denise Morrison, ITOM Manager at CAE – a global leader in aviation and defense – showed us how to bridge this gap.
Watch the full video:
Real-World Success: CAE’s ITOM Journey
CAE started their journey by focusing on their most critical applications. Denise shared that, before adopting ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model (CSDM), teams often used the same name for both a service and an offering, which created confusion and inconsistent reporting.
Our team at Ateko played a crucial role in guiding CAE. By facilitating collaborative modeling sessions with enterprise architects and application owners, our team systematically mapped their critical business applications to the underlying infrastructure, the technical services they rely on, and the specific business outcomes they support. To ensure the model addressed real-world operational needs rather than just theory, we analyzed past incident and change tickets to understand exactly how services were being consumed and where the pain points lived. This practical, use-case-driven approach helped CAE design a new model that clearly distinguished between business services, service offerings, and application environments (such as Production, QA, and Development).
Choose Your Starting Point: Application Focus Vs. Service Focus
You cannot tackle your entire enterprise infrastructure and applications at once. When you begin your journey, we recommend you start by choosing an approach that fits your culture and operating model.
| Approach | Best For | First Steps |
| Application-Focused | Organizations driven by internal enterprise architecture (e.g., standard corporate IT). | Align with Enterprise Architecture. Identify 20 to 50 “crown jewel” or P1 business applications to map first. |
| Service-Focused | Organizations that expose digital products or services to end users (e.g., Telecoms, Utilities, and Financial Institutions). | Identify business and technical services. Define the offerings currently exposed to internal or external consumers. |
No matter where you start, your target state is to have your infrastructure mapped to your applications and business services. This allows you to understand the impact of incidents, assess change risk, and manage problems with confidence.
Find the “Sweet Spot”
The single biggest factor behind a usable dependency view is the level of detail.
If you model too high-level (for example, one generic application service for global SAP), your maps will become unreadable, and your CI relationships turn into noise. If you model too granular, you will risk creating an unmanageable maintenance burden that stalls adoption.
Your goal is the “sweet spot,” meaning the minimum level of detail required to answer your most important operational questions. You can use these drivers to guide your Application Service granularity:
- ITSM Consumption: Would you use this Application Service independently in a change ticket? If yes, split it into its own Application Service. If no, consolidate.
- Environment: Do you manage these processes for non-production environments? If yes, separate Production, QA/Staging, and Development as needed.
- Geography: Do you deploy changes to specific sites or regions independently? If yes, split Application Services by region or site.
- Architecture: Do these Application Services run on different technology stacks with different performance or availability impacts? If yes, create separate instances (for example, an Admin instance and an End User instance).
Best Practices for CSDM Modeling
- Start with people and process: Facilitate modeling sessions with Enterprise Architects, application owners, and SMEs in a whiteboard or diagramming tool before you run automated discovery.
- Keep your CMDB clean: Use a consistent classification approach. Teams often confuse software or foundational IT platforms with true business applications.
If you are working to build a service-aware CMDB, or you need help defining application models that will support your ITSM and ITOM objectives, reach out to Ateko to support your journey.
