QUESTION: What are some examples of the data sources that would be in scope?

MARY: There is almost always Active Directory for user data, roles, locations, etc. There are also IT tools for monitoring and access, like LogicMonitor and SailPoint, that provide asset and configuration item and asset management data. Lastly, sometimes an HR platform is also in play like Workday.

QUESTION: What does “organize data” actually mean?

MARY: In the simplest of explanations, it means aligning to CSDM(common service data model). This includes categorizing user, foundational, process, and referential data—and putting it in the right tables. Basically, following the CSDM data model.

QUESTION: Why is data cleanup, categorization, normalization, etc. so important?

MARY: Three major reasons: deduplication, normalization, accuracy. Deduplication is critical because if you leave duplicated data in the system it can lead to issues such as outages or longer mean time to repair (MTTR). Normalization ensures consistent naming for data throughout the platform such as vendor names. For example, Microsoft is not MS, MicroSoft, MS Microsoft, etc..,which means reporting will be accurate. This leads me to the final reason for making sure data is clean: it ensures the accuracy of how an organization is operating.

QUESTION: What are some of the other consequences of not having correct data prior to an implementation?

MARY: You know the old saying, “Garbage in, garbage out.” The obvious ramification is not getting end-to-end visibility. More critically, it can cause an organization to have to re-deploy ServiceNow. The business needs good data to from the operations and services teams to make decisions on key business initiatives.

QUESTION: How does something like this play out in the real world?

MARY: One example is a company where I helped them set up Discovery and got it running, but they stopped it because they were so concerned that scanning was going to kill their operations. The company is depending on people to manually update company data, and they have poor CMDB health. This leads to the problems they have with their incident management, where incidents take more time to resolve because their monitoring tools are shoving incidents directly into incident management without using the filter capabilities of Event Management.

QUESTION: How does an organization recover from having brought in bad data?

MARY: First, they recover by recognizing that they're not getting what they need out of reports.

Typically, they’ll have to put time and resources into remediation because it’s hard to remediate data while it’s in use. Before fixing a data issue, they need to understand where it came from—an integration, bad manually-added data, etc. I say they need to quarantine that bad data, if possible. Then they need to use data validation tools that can help determine which data is good.

However, they may still need to do some data enrichment to fill in what data is missing. For example, when setting up the CMDB, they might not have paid attention to product models and will need to add them now.

The way organizations get to the needed discipline for data management is through governance. Organizations need to document processes to clean up bad data and to implement auditing and monitoring of data going forward. A key factor that is often missed is user training and awareness—good organizational change management. Users need to be educated on the effects of bad data as well as what's in it for them to adhere to processes to keep data clean. Lastly, organizations need to have the ability to verify accuracy and validity of data.

Thank you, Mary, for all that great information! If you want to learn more about how to manage data in ServiceNow, visit our community product hub, Data Foundations and check out Platform Live on ServiceNow events.