Building Order to Service Data | Common Service Data Model (CSDM)
By: Tucker N. 

What is CSDM?

Businesses in various sectors – like financial, healthcare, government – rely on their IT infrastructure to maintain reliable data and services to offer consistent business value to their userbase. Since no one business is alike to the other – it can be challenging to determine an optimal way to organize IT assets and model systems to the services an organization provides.

ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model (CSDM) provides a framework to help guide businesses to model their data and services more effectively to their IT infrastructure, thus increasing visibility to their offerings and improving business operations.

The Link Between CSDM and CMDB

The CSDM framework goes hand in hand with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CMDB answers “what” an organization has in terms of their IT environment –serving as repository of an organization’s IT environment – holding information about hardware assets, software, and services. The CSDM answers the “how” regarding the CMDB – how an organization organizes their CMDB data, relates them to one another, and determines their involvement in business services provided.

Together, CSDM and CMDB improve the visibility of an organization’s IT environment and service offerings, thus enabling teams to quickly assess impact and dependencies to reduce operational downtimes.

The Key to Visibility and Acceleration

Aligning to the CSDM framework significantly improves service visibility by clearly defining and connecting business services, applications, and underlying infrastructure in a consistent, standardized way. This structured approach makes it easier to understand how technology supports business outcomes, enabling teams to quickly assess impact and dependencies. By providing a proven data model, CSDM accelerates the implementation of ServiceNow modules – like ITSM and ITOM, reducing design effort and rework while ensuring out-of-the-box capabilities function as intended. Additionally, aligning to CSDM enforces consistency across the platform, allowing multiple teams and processes to use the same trusted service and CI data, which improves data quality, operational efficiency, and cross-functional collaboration.

The Phases of CSDM

ServiceNow outlines the CSDM framework into five phases – allowing businesses to easily understand the stages of maturity to an optimized IT environment and to help them determine where they are in their CSDM journey.

ServiceNow outlines the CSDM framework into five phases – allowing businesses to easily understand the stages of maturity to an optimized IT environment and to help them determine where they are in their CSDM journey.

Foundation

Establishes the core data and relationships needed for accurate and consistent CMDB management. It focuses on defining standard naming conventions, foundational CMDB tables (such as CMDB groups, locations, users, and user groups), and governance practices to ensure data quality and reliability across the platform.

 

Crawl

Introduces basic CSDM data by populating foundational configuration items like business applications, services, and infrastructure. The goal is visibility and correctness, not perfection. This is often accomplished using manual or lightly automated data sources.

 

Walk

Expands service modeling by linking applications, services, and dependencies more accurately. Processes such as incident, change, and request begin to consistently use CSDM-aligned data. In this stage, businesses should address infrastructure management challenges to further help them become more efficient across their IT systems.

 

Run

Operational maturity increases as CSDM data becomes more trusted and actively drives ITSM, ITOM, and reporting. Automation, health metrics, and impact analysis rely on well-maintained service and application models.

 

Fly

CSDM becomes a strategic asset that supports advanced use cases like predictive analytics, business outcomes, and cross-domain workflows. Continuous optimization, strong governance, and high automation enable faster decision-making and innovation.

 

CSDM not only serves as a data model to help businesses structure their technology and services, but also as a roadmap to aid businesses in growing into their current infrastructure, expanding where necessary. Leveraging the CSDM framework provides organizations with the opportunity to identify ways they can leverage their data as a dynamic resource to support informed decision-making and enable service-aware operations.