All right. We're, we're, We're good now.
but what are we talking about today?
Duke. We got a special guest with us today. We've got Mark Bodman. Who is the amazing, amazing, amazing expert at DC MDV.
And not only CMDB, but also CSDM too, right?
CSDM. Yes. Yes. I was in the room when we created that at a knowledge in 2017. So we kind of created the idea to do that. So, yeah.
Why I thought you were the inventor of it. I felt like I'd let you say that part though.
Well, I mean, I don't have a history in operations. My history is more enterprise architecture, strategic planning and development. So I don't know how I landed in the CMDB space. It was really a little bit of a fluke. But yeah, it's proven to be very beneficial for everybody, though.
Well, the reason we reached out to you, Mark, is that, at least from my perspective, the customers I deal with they have a hard enough time with CMDB, let alone CSDM, and we're trying to try demystify CMDB, demystify CSDM for the everyday person.
Yeah, not not an easy thing to do, by the way.
I was going to say no pressure.
I mean, that's why we, that's why we brought you though. Right?
yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it really says it in the name. When you spell it out, it's the common service data model is what CSDM stands for. When we started this effort, it was called originally definition of service DOS, and that was just a horrible name for many reasons, but we changed it to CSDM because it wasn't just defining a service, it was all the other data model elements that go along with it. So that's kind of how we became CSDM.
okay, so you were in the room when it happened. What was the catalyst for that conversation to begin with?
so little, little background. I came in here to service now to manage a product called app portfolio management. so my, background is strategic planning, rationalizing apps. I used to work for a company called true that did a software. I was at HP software as a strategist, their enterprise architect. And when I came here to manage APM, I kind of thought, Oh, great. You know, we're going to join forces, same platform, same data model.
Well, I found out it wasn't really the same data model and we had little pockets of data model and I started running into my, peer product managers in terms of like, what service do I use in my APM product? Right. Which ones do I refer to? And we had like. 100 different types of services, and I didn't know which one to use, and nobody could explain it for me, what services were which, what they really meant, and how they were used, you know, by other products here. So it was, it was myself.
There was an ITOM representative, and there was a, I T S M representative in the room and we just got together. We got our leadership to kind of agree to bring us together and we discussed well, we need to sort this out. It was an escalation point because we were frustrated. Our customers were frustrated and we said, well, we need to be on common ground. Hence, the name common service data model.
Nice.
that was sort of the driver. And my colleague scott lem who was in expert services I don't know if any any of you guys know scott from from way back
I don't.
Yeah, so he's been around a while. He's more heavily focused on asset management, but also heavily on cmdb too he started taking this work we were doing right amongst the product managers And showing it to customers and they loved it Probably not everybody but a lot of them did because it helps sort out where they put their data it just kind of snowballed from there. I mean it it's been a long journey. I mean The apm product is pretty mature. It keeps evolving, right?
But I I came over to csdm and cmdb to get this thing moving in a bigger way and it has it's been it's just taken over most of my life
Oh, wow. I kind of feel the same way about ServiceNow, truthfully. You know, it's interesting to say that on the eve of Knowledge, right? Like, where my entire week, honestly, my entire May, you know, revolves around, like, two different things, right? It revolves around Knowledge. And then secondarily, it involves around Mother's Day for my, for my wife, from the kids perspective. Right? And so, like, those are the two things that exist in May in my life now. And, uh, yeah.
And so, I guess you've got, the CSDM.
Yes, yes, my daughters have, are grown and out of the house. So, uh, one of them is one quarter as of today, she's a quarter way done with her veterinary degree. So she's going to be a veterinary doctor. So,
That's awesome. Ha ha ha ha ha.
All right, so forgive me if I'm asking the question a 2nd time, but. if we just erased all the progress you guys made on CSDM, to the average ServiceNow customer, what is the, like, the annoying, frustrating, itchy pain? What is the gaping wound that's still left over?
yeah. So if CSDM weren't here, okay. There would be a couple of problems, i'll start with the internal problems with our plus product managers We've grown a lot right when I joined the company. We're like 4 000 people now We're 24 000 and there's a lot of products as you probably know we've kind of expanded into so many other areas And the first problem is our product management folks wouldn't know how to talk to each other, what our data is, what is common across the products.
We would design complete isolated products on this platform. Nothing would talk to anything else. That would be the result. And if we did talk to each other, it would be accidental. It's like, Oh, everybody uses the CMDB. Oh yeah. Car sorta, not the same way. So we would all be in little pockets. The advantage of being on the platform. I always tell customers is we can share our data. We can share and contribute to the data that we use. So we need, not just the workflow.
So workflows we talk about quite a bit, but. A lot of the workflows have to refer to the same data. I'll just pick on like locations. That's an easy one. The location hierarchy is shared by a lot of different processes and workflows in the platform. But if that ain't right, everybody's going to be off on a different page with, with regards to a location data.
that's a simple one, but that gets, that's, that's our first problem is the products themselves would be all isolated or it'd be a jumbled mess.
Yeah, I got to tell you, I like that you, you picked on the location table there because even prior to the CSDM, one of the things that I always found that was common across like the various, processes and service now was. Location, right? Like you had a, you have a request or a client that's, part of a process, right? And you often want to know where they are so that you can call them back or send someone to their desk or, anything like that.
And one of the early selling points for us when I was still on the service, now customer side was the fact that the data model, even started in a place where a lot of those common, feels like that were. federated across some of the processes. And of course, CSDM just takes it to the next level, right?
Yeah, we kind of stepped in to manage what's common because there was nobody it's kind of like, you know, you own it. No, you want it. No, you want it. Nobody really took ownership of this stuff, which was common. And we kind of stepped in and we do that.
Are the CSDM tables in the CMDB, or are they just a collection of tables
some are, yeah, some are and some are not. I'll pick on service for a minute because under the covers, the service tables are C. I. S. We treat them like C. I. S. But they're not really representative infrastructure. So if you're an item customer, you're managing data centers. You don't really think about the services when you're C. I. S. So the lines of your traditional cmdb are blurry, but when I came aboard the business applications, that's an architecture thing It's very high level.
Like I said, my background is strategic planning. It's in it's a they're a ci there's but they're not a traditional operational thing That, you know, you would discover they're not representative of something in the data center. It's a higher level concept. so that's what kind of drove us to work together to figure out what is the right data model for us to all coexist. We're all in the same boat. How do we all create our own little room, but then what's the common area?
I was in the military and you live in barracks and, you've got your own room, but, and you got to share the common stuff, you know, the bathrooms and the common eating areas and whatnot. So that's the idea.
I like that analogy.
Yeah. the second big driver is customers. They were frustrated. I remember my first customer that I, when I first came here in 2016, I went to visit a customer in Atlanta and. They were frustrated because they had all these questions about, well, why are you having me enter the same information in three different places, Mark? And I'm like, I didn't have an answer. Like, I don't know. It's you have three different products.
You're going to have to enter the same information in three different places. Good luck. That's not a very good answer, right? You know, we're on the same platform. Why aren't we sharing? So I was exposed to the need from customers right off the bat, right when I joined.
where were they having to put information multiple places?
Oh, well, locations one
Heh.
picked on that one. we also had issues with services. We had over 45 different types of services. And this particular customer was implementing I T. F. M. And there was something called the financial I. T. Service. And they're like, Mark, these are the same as the services I'm using for I. T. S. M. You know, this is the basic business service table and i'm like, well, I don't know why you're having to create it twice So you get you got two products. You have to create it twice.
Oh add a third one You got another table to populate so you add that out to 45 different tables And the customer is scratching their head saying you're asking me to enter the same exact detail in 45 different places Why would you want me to do that if you're all on the same platform
Yeah, you know, and that makes a lot of sense to write, like when you think about it, right? You should only have to enter like common data or found, is where we're calling the common data here. But, you know, as we're talking about it, because I haven't done like a phase 1 implementation and in a while, but when I'm. When I'm doing those things with my customers, I call it foundational data, right? Uh, and it's the same thing, though, right?
you want to populate that data in an instance because so much builds on top of it, but you don't want to be entering it in several different places, right? all across the platform, right? Because then, I mean, it's the redundancy, but let's, even That to the side for a second, right? Like the redundancy to me is like it is an issue, but it's a smaller issue compared to the inability to keep it in sync and keep it accurate,
Yes. Yes. Yes. Not only that, but common logic would say if you're on the same platform and, there's no reason to have separate data. and a matter of fact, one of the things we train our customers or our product managers when they come aboard is that before you create your own separate structures, look at the common data, right? Is there something already there that you can use? I'll give you an example in the location.
We had these products that came out, get back to work and if you bought that product, It had a completely separate data structure for locations like your buildings where you work than the common location table, and I heard about it almost immediately because the product team just created their own space. And now customers are saying, wait a minute, why? Why? It's a it was a never ending stream of complaints from customers that were questioning the fact that we're not sharing data.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, especially when you're when you start to get used to it, right? Like, at this point, service now has continues to get mature with each release, right? But it's a, you know, if you look at it from, say, Berlin or Calgary versus now, I mean, we're almost at the end of the alphabet. This is crazy. I am. This is nuts. Um, but we're almost at the end of the alphabet, right?
And the level of maturity that's occurred over the course of the alphabet, It's so insane that when you join the, platform now, like you would just expect this stuff to work in this way. Right. Yeah. Whereas if you've been around for a while, like you remember when it didn't and
Well, there was fewer products on the platform that depended on the data, right? When back when we were just service management, it was no big deal because we didn't have much of a CMDB. We didn't have ITOM visibility or ITOM health or cloud. And the stuff I personally worked on with APM, we didn't, you know, or PPM, all of these things, Agile, SecOps, so also Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery Planning, imagine if they all started from scratch.
Rather than using each other's data, I mean, it would be so much more expensive to manage and get those products up and running if they didn't use each other's data.
yeah, that's a good point. Expensive, right? Because that does, you know, going back to the manual upkeep and the manual population, right. That does require, resources and it does. Limit some of the higher level stuff that you can do immediately because you're populating that low level data.
That's right. And at the center of it is really what's in the data center or in the cloud. we're here in it to create and maintain what I call digital products were there to create code that runs somewhere to do some job, or provide, a customer feature or an internal employee, some automation. that's where everything starts, but then everything else around it, services, the apps, the planning, the jobs that, you know, tasks people do, it's all contextual to that.
It's all surrounding the stuff you're managing in data centers, which is where the CMDB sits.
Okay. So wait, I just, just, I want to just back up on that. And you said we're here to provide, and can you say that part again? Because I think that's really key for a lot of consultants out there to hear. Um, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, the infrastructure is there to provide applications that run the business. And these are services that we automate, you know, self service, health care, if you're in the health care business, automation of factories, if you're in a factory situation. So you have all these All this automation in I. T. Which is providing the core value for your business. And so, at the root of it is what's running in the data center.
It's the CMDB that represents the core entity, which is compute with code running on it. And, that's what everything else is context from there.
Would you say that people should have a decent CMDB before doing anything CSDM wise, or do they go in parallel?
Yeah, they're in parallel. I mean, we came out with this framework called crawl, walk, run, fly, and that's in our CSDM training. You can get online learning in a bunch of videos that we've recorded over the years. but it is, it does start with a CMDB perspective, and I like to think about it is the stuff you can go out and touch.
it's you know, you're managing assets you're paying for It's real money being spent on real things cloud or on premise You start with that because you can go in inventory. You can discover it. Then you build on that to understand what you think you have i'll just give you a story from my past. I was at dell for many years and One of the things that I we did at dell was we You Took an inventory of our applications because we didn't really know all the apps that we had.
We had 12, 000 after we came up with the inventory. Well, those, that inventory was not connected to what was running in the data center. And so we thought we had 12, 000 apps, but in reality it was six because people miscounted. and then we further found out a thousand data, uh, servers in the data center that had no purpose. Like, okay, these apps don't tie out to anything in the data center. And we,
Silence.
um, you know, you gotta have a tighter control from what you think you have from an application point of view to the stuff in the data center you're managing every day. And if that's not. That's what we focused in on crawl. It's like, okay, if you can't manage this it shops, then anything you do beyond that is going to be questionable.
Yeah. And, and that, makes a whole lot of sense to me, it all needs to be coupled together. You all need, you need to manage it in such a way so that, you absolutely know what you have without having to, without having to guess. Really? Because yeah. Because,
a store and not knowing what's in the store at any given time. So you can reorder the right stuff or, you know, it was broken or stolen, right? You gotta go back and inventory what's in your store every period to make sure you're, you're making up for anything that happened that you didn't expect.
yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the more confusing parts of the CSDM for me, is the various different types of services that all seem to be like almost the same service, but slightly different. And, and, and when, which is called for in the course of an implementation.
Well Luckily, you don't you didn't see the 45 or by by some counts. Somebody said we had 130 different types of services Okay, so it's a lot easier than it used to be. but there's only three now. There's only three
Okay.
All right. So so the first one is a business service the best way to think about business services I know it's the last mile. It's like the power line connecting your house You are, you know who the customer is, you know where the customer is, location, right? and you know the impact to the customer at that point.
Okay.
and states Everybody's kind of connected in there's a lot of impact if they go down but things like ldap storage services that are kind of under the covers a layer or two down underneath the application Design the architecture of the app and the last thing Last applicant is the application service. And to me, that's the one that's most controversial because the app service represents logically the instance of an app, including all of its infrastructure network devices.
And so when I think about an application like service now, you know, you have to stand that up. We run on our infrastructure. We have resource. There's a database. There's storage, right? All of these pieces are required to work together to make, service network. Now you don't have access to that as a customer, but we have to manage it.
So,
to, I want to trouble click on that too, because that's basically how I test myself. If I get it or not, what I'm building in service now is like, can I model service now in service now? But from the customer perspective, of course, I don't have to worry about, the cloud or as I like to call it, somebody else's computer. there's so many applications within ServiceNow. Like when I was the product owner at a company, it was like, okay, well we've got ServiceNow in general.
We've got G-R-C-S-P-M-I-T-S-M, and the 40 different apps underneath that. How do you model all of that in the CMBB
Yeah, so
Is that more of A-C-M-B-B question or more of A-C-S-D-M question or both?
yeah, it's a both. And matter of fact, there's less, I would say, requirement for plastic seem to be an infrastructure because that's not a big part of modeling service. Now it's, it's more at the logical level. It's the app service structures. We, You have in our youtube channel a number of examples and platforms.
It's we're a platform That's kind of our shtick and we have a a example model on how to model any platform Not just service now, right but sap is considered a platform sharepoint in all the sites So that sharepoint is considered a platform. It's there to host many sites so there's a pattern for that. I'm an architect. They think about patterns and the reusability of these patterns And so as a platform we have structures In the CSDM that explain exactly that.
So we use the app service to decouple and delineate the application from a instance of the, platform and the products that run on it, because oftentimes in a company, a big company, you'll have a platform owner, which manages the platform itself, and then each product does something different for some other stakeholder. So we have to decouple those in how we're managing them operationally. I don't know if that helps. It's hard to do this without a
Yeah, it's like
Ha ha ha.
time we're sorry, we're audio only,
you know, but I mean, think about ownership and responsibility that drives that logical layer, right? When we're when we're talking about Oh, what do you own? What do you not own? You got to point to something. And even if it's in the cloud and service now platform, you got to separate out the owner of the platform versus the Owner of the apps like I own change management. I don't own the service now.
So there's a different person That's got to approve the upgrade to change management if you want to upgrade that versus just the whole darn platform
and it's not just the ownership as much. I mean, just the fact that the separate things exist on it. So you can, as a service now product or platform owner, you can see the types of things that eat up all your resources.
Exactly.
why do we have to spit? Like, why is like, 80 percent of our work focused on incident management
That's right
You know and Silence.
there's a cost to it as well And there's controls to who can access these products that we sell who's accessing hrsd versus I don't know itfm or apm or you know, you name it. So there's different controls That we want to put in place for the apps on the platform
That's interesting. and the way that you said that, and I just wanna bring back in what you said previous to Duke's question here. 'cause it made me think to how much of the CSDM. Came out of, uh, you know, because again, right knowledge is next week. How much of the CSDM came out of now on now work
Believe it or not Not a helpful
really
Yeah, and here's the reason we we have used service now to run service now for years We have I don't know. We probably have about 10 different instances of service now running to run our company different complete proper. They're not integrated, right?
But they're well, they're integrated but not on the same platform instance So We have a lot of legacy that we're cleaning up and that's kind of where a lot of customers are at too, if they've been on since Aspen or before, Calgary, so they've got a lot of unique customizations they've built. They've got their own data model. They've got, a huge amount of reporting and in workflow, all, all kind of custom made around their custom model.
and that's where a lot of customers are trying to, move over to CSDM. And, we're included, we're not quite there yet. The app service for us is really the key area we're working on now.
nice. So if I were to ask you and I'm going to treat this a little bit like a working session, right. I'm going to, put myself in the shoes of the audience. And if I was to say, what's the thing that's most. commonly done incorrectly with the CSDM or most or least commonly understood, what would you say, Mark?
Well, one is what you already asked, the difference between these services, because, you know, if you're an ITIL person, you go to ITIL certification classes, our definitions are a little different than ITIL. If you're an architect, our definitions are a little different from TOGAF or any of the architecture frameworks. So we've had to come up with something that works for everybody. And so it is a bit of a unique. Thing.
So you got to look at our definitions and the products that use and create these things so that you understand how they're used. So that's one is just the service itself.
Okay.
the second one is, is really the application because we have three applications too. There's three core services types, three core applications And application services is both it's where they come together So it's kind of interesting that way we have business apps We have application services and then we have just regular apps which are deployed on individual Computers, really.
so it's just really understanding the entity, how it's used, where it goes when you're adopting the platform or moving data over from your own data model to what we, what we now provide as guidance. But those are the two areas that are probably the hardest. now the good news, this is where it becomes quite interesting. There are a lot of product features built over the last two and a half years, three years now, which Use the Csdm, they, create the data in the way we prescribe.
So there's one product in particular that most people aren't even aware called Service Builder. So the question about what service to use is explained right there in plain text in Service builder, if you used it. But if you go to the table structure, you'll scratch your head. What are of 43 different tables should I use? You know?
Yeah. So that's actually a good, segue to talk a little bit about, The difference is between some of us old guys, like, me and to do great been around for a while. And then some of the newer folks who are just getting involved in service now, And, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the difference in the alphabet, right? I think I started towards the end of Berlin, you know, and now we're on Washington, D. C. That's, that's a lot of letters in between there. A lot of, right.
And a lot of the stuff though, that, you know, I learned how to do back in BCD land, it's become such muscle memory, even in W land. I'm still using the, that, um, you know, those patterns, even though there might be something better now. that gives additional context and probably, guides me in a way that saves me time and effort and keeps me on the right track versus, having to figure it out, like we did in the old days.
And I know one of those things is gen AI, but there's a lot of these other tools, like you said, service creator, that. I don't think I've integrated into my tool set yet.
Yeah, service builder, by the
There was a builder. Sorry. Yeah.
But that's the thing. I mean, we are moving so quickly. It's hard for me to keep up. I work for the company and we come out with new stuff so rapidly every quarter. Now we're no longer, you know, a family release. No, no, there's so much stuff in the store. It's incredible. Um,
stop me from ranting.
so
This is why we like, okay, low key mark. This is why we'd love to have you like almost as a regular appearance on the show. It is. I mean, it's one thing for you guys to be like, whew, this is moving fast, but. I need you to think about the customer experience and even the ServiceNow expert experience, freelance partner, whatever the case may be, like, not only do we look for, like the new stuff is in the same pile as
all the old
years of everything else. And so like, I frequently go and try and like, I'm trying to find information on SPMs, they have a new resource record type. For resource management. Right. And how do I find out more about this? And it's just type into Google resource management. It's just forget about it. You can't find anything. And so the cure for that is just a lot more spotlight and a lot more interaction with the community. And I wish there was even like, some kind of chronological thing.
You know what I mean? Something that just showed, the CSDM and let me slide from 2024 to 2023 and kind of like, at least I can go to 2024 and see just the stuff for that year.
Yeah, I mean, it is hard. I mean, I can't imagine how it is being in your shoes where you're, you know, most of your day is probably getting the job done for some customers, and not learning about or understanding what's coming next. The volume of information and change is just incredible. And we hear about it as product managers. I mean, our customers complain about it. We're coming out too fast for them to consume the products updates, right? All the changes.
so how do we communicate this and how do we, keep improving things while at the same time making sure that you're on the, same journey? that's not an easy thing to do. there's no easy answer. I could tell you what I've done, And the reason maybe you're calling me is I have a principle. If I have to answer the same question more than three times, I record it and I publish it. I have a, it's like, okay. So over the last three years, okay. Four years almost, I've started to just record things.
Some stuff is small, some stuff is big. And sometimes I'll bring on a guest, like you're doing with me. And I'll, talk about something that I don't quite understand and ask a bunch of questions like you are, and I'll record it and I'll just put it out there. And that's kind of done a lot of good to get the, uh, the information out on various topics.
and just to give you some metrics the the videos that me and my team not just me right but my whole team There's over there's 600 000 views of these videos now on our community. youtube, so it's crazy It's it's really people love this stuff and uh, I get fan bombed Now it's like mark. I know your voice. I've never met you, but I know your voice like okay
that's okay. So co hosting podcast, right. And, you know, and having folks listen to it and then showing up at somewhere like knowledge and then folks like CJ and, and Right, but,
Well, that's the problem. I have that every year too. I like i'll be walking around and somebody's saying mark and I can't get to my destination. I just keep getting you know Lambasted so
it's incredibly cool, right? Like, I love it. I love meeting people. I the reason I go to knowledge is for the people, honestly, right? And it's just awesome. But it's it's funny, the, asymmetrical relationship that it forms with
I know I
Right? Like they feel like they know you because they've listened to you every week for like a year, right? And you know, you've never seen them before, right?
I am grateful that I was able to help them That whatever I did in that few minutes of recording brought some answers to them where they didn't have before and i'm like well You As long as it's working, I'll keep doing it.
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know,
No, but I love it. I love helping people. My biggest challenge is saying no. So when somebody comes to me with a question, I try to get to an answer. Even if it's not me, it's pointing them in the right direction. and I'll be, I know you've been on the platform for a long time. I stopped developing code years ago. I mean, I used to do C and Microsoft foundation classes way back in the day. But, I know we're kind of low code, no code, but.
I try to stay out of that and just try to stick with the problems and trying to answer problems and direct people to where they need to go.
so we got 35 minutes of record. So, at this point, I'll ask you, Mark, give you the last word. Is there one or two things you wish people would know about CSDM? You
by that? Well, we came out with CSDM as a compromise, an agreed upon model among very different disciplines. My background is architecture and development. my colleagues were not. That's not their background. They were infrastructure managers and service managers. So, if you study CSDM and you can map it to your world, it'll mean a lot more to you. And it's represented, at least for us, a way to put everybody involved on the same picture. Because previous to CSDM, that just didn't exist.
So, figure out where you sit. You don't need to know it all. You just need to agree and understand the map where you fit and then use that as your common map when you're talking to your colleagues. that's the big thing.
and I know, 35 minutes, but I just want, Mark, one last thing. is there anything at knowledge that's going on with the CSDM that you
Oh, yes.
only get to pick five.
Yeah, well, there's gonna be some big announcements around LLM, as you probably can guess. You're probably seeing hints of that. the big thing for us is announcing version 5 and when that's coming out and what's included. we've been hinting on that as well in a couple different venues. But, think about this. An LLM is only as good as the data that goes into it.
That's true. Yep.
so that makes you think how important is CSTM? How important is the CMDB to get it right? To be trusting it, entirely to do all this other LLM stuff you're doing. so your house is only as good as the foundation and. This data is the foundation. Yes. Yes.
we're going to have Mark send us some of the links that he was talking about. We'll get them in the description below for you. Otherwise, check out ServiceNow's, YouTube channel and search for CSDM. Mark, thank you so much for coming to the show. I really hope we can make this a regular thing, so that we can really get CSDM to just be that, that one thing everybody does and does it super well because they understand it.
Understand it from your point of view. You don't have to you know, a lot of folks they're not architects They're not going to understand everything in there But You're a slice of the world know where you fit where you sit and how everybody else relates and then you're good to go
Awesome. Thanks for so much for coming, Mark. And, uh, thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you on the next one.
My pleasure