The ServiceNow® Service Builder application provides a guided experience workflow to create and maintain services and offerings. Service Builder was enhanced and updated in the Vancouver release.

Service Builder highlights for the Vancouver release

  • Use the new approval process for services and service offerings.
  • Improved the checkout experience when you edit services and offerings. Check out a service or a single child offering one at a time. When you check out the service, you don’t have to check out all its child offerings.
  • Use updated fields, tooltips, and guidance text that help you to:
    • Define service teams for offerings.
    • Define the technical service relationships to application services.

See Service Builder for more information.

Important: Service Builder is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

New in the Vancouver release

Service Builder approval flow

Use the new approval process to customize how you want to approve services and service offerings. By default, the approval flow in Service Builder is set to approve services automatically. As an administrator, you can update a setting in ServiceNow® Flow Designer to enable the approval flow that comes with the base system. You can also edit the flow in Flow Designer for a customized approval flow that best meets your needs.

Use the improved checkout experience to edit a service or a single offering one at a time. You can check out a service to edit it without checking out its child offerings – the offerings remain in the Published state until they’re separately checked out.

Create a service in Service Builder
  • Use updated fields and tooltips to define your service teams in the Team tab of the Manage Offering subflow:
    • Added the following fields for technical services: Change Group and Managed By Group.
    • Added the following field for business services: Change Group.
  • Use the updated section, field, and tooltip to define technical service relationships to application services on the Operations tab of the Manage Offering subflow.
    • Renamed the Dependencies section to Relationships.
    • In the Relationships section, updated the Application Dependencies field to Application services I contain.
    • Added the application service type Dynamic CI groups in the application services table [cmdb_ci_service_auto table].

Activation information

Install Service Builder by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

Related ServiceNow applications and features

Service Portfolio Management
Use the ServiceNow® Service Portfolio Management application to set up and manage your services and offerings, and then organize them in portfolios. If you use the ServiceNow® Digital Portfolio Management application, you can view the health and status of those portfolios and track them in one centralized location.
Digital Portfolio Management
Add Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) from the ServiceNow Store to view all your Service Portfolio Management data in one centralized place. If you transition to the new service portfolio structure in Service Portfolio Management, then you can use key performance indicator (KPI) groups in DPM to report on services, nodes, and portfolio performance. The new service portfolio structure in Service Portfolio Management is available starting with the Utah release.
Important: If you use DPM and plan to upgrade to the current version of Service Builder, you must also upgrade to the current version of DPM at the same time.
Service Catalog
Service Portfolio Management integrates with ServiceNow® Service Catalog at the service offering level of the application. You can choose services from an existing catalog as well as initiating service catalog additions.