Managing Base Code and Configuration
ServiceNow provides baseline ITIL functionality as their stock service offering to customers. It’s functionality can be customized to suit your own requirements or be easily extended to provide for other service management functionality that the business needs to manage outside of IT. With the ability to highly customize baseline “out-of-box” functionality, it presents a dilemma when performing a major version upgrade or applying ServiceNow mandated patches (i.e. upgrades with inclusive bug fixes and feature enhancements as a holistic installation package). There is no facility for managing deltas outside of the system for applying major version upgrades/“patch update”. This article discusses the shortcomings and some lessons I have learned in maintaining client facing code in ServiceNow.