I want to talk about something that's broken. Something that's been broken for a long time, and nobody's really had the courage to say it out loud.

Your enterprise IT operations are stuck in 1995.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "But Chris, we've invested millions in SAP, Dynatrace, Data Bricks and ServiceNow. We've got ITSM, ITOM, SPM, all the acronyms. We're modern."

Are you?

Let me ask you something simple. When that critical database server fails at 3 AM, can you answer this question in five seconds: "Which business services are down, and which customers are affected?"

If you can't, you're not managing services. You're managing components. And there's a profound difference.

The Hidden Crisis: Why Your Ferrari is Stuck in First Gear

Here's what's happening in most organisations today. You've spent millions—sometimes tens of millions—on the most sophisticated enterprise platform ever built. ServiceNow is extraordinary. It's the closest thing to an operating system for the entire enterprise that anyone's ever created.

But you're using it like a fancy ticketing system.

It's like buying an iPhone and only using it to make phone calls. You've got this incredible device with a computer, a camera, the internet in your pocket—and you're just using it as a phone.

Why? Because you're not service-aware.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Most IT organisations today operate in what I call "technology-aware" mode. They know they have servers, databases, applications, networks. They monitor these things. They track them. They create tickets when they break.

But they don't understand the service.

And that's the whole game. That's everything.

Think about it like this. When you use an iPhone, you don't think about the M or ARM processor, the NAND flash storage, the radio transceivers. You think about sending a message, taking a photo, finding a restaurant. You think about the service the device provides.

That's service awareness. It's understanding your technology landscape through the lens of business outcomes, not technical components.

And when you get this right—when you truly become service-aware—three extraordinary things happen. Three pillars of transformation that fundamentally change how your organisation operates.

Let me show you.

Pillar One: Technology Intensity

Or: Your applications are intellectual property

The first pillar we call Technology Intensity.

Now, this might sound technical, but it's actually simple. It's about recognising something fundamental: your technology estate isn't overhead. It's intellectual property. It's your digital factory. And just like any factory, you need to know what you're making, what it costs, and whether it's any good.

But here's the problem. Most organisations have no idea what they're making.

Ask a CTO: "Which of your 2,000 applications support your most critical business capabilities?" They can't tell you. Not precisely. Not with data.

Ask: "Which applications are running on technology that's about to hit end-of-life?" Silence. Or worse, they pull out a spreadsheet that's six months out of date.

Ask: "Where's your technical debt?" They wave their hands and say "everywhere."

This is madness.

An organisation that is technology intense, knows exactly what they’re building. It knows which technologies powered which experiences. It knows the dependency chain from the user interface down to the silicon. It must, it has to. You can't create insanely great products without understanding how everything connects.

Service awareness brings this discipline to enterprise IT.

Here's how it works. When you implement the Common Service Data Model properly—and we'll talk more about that in a minute—you create something powerful: a living map of your digital estate.

Not just a static inventory of computers and software. A map. A dependency chain that flows from business capability down through business applications, through service instances, all the way to infrastructure.

So when a new zero-day vulnerability drops—let's say Log4j, which terrified every CISO on the planet—you don't panic. You don't send out emails asking everyone to check their systems. You don't spend weeks trying to figure out your exposure.

You query the map. And in seconds, you see: "Here are the 47 business services affected. Here are the 12 that are customer-facing. Here's the prioritised remediation schedule based on business criticality."

That's not IT management. That's strategic portfolio management. That's Technology Intensity.

And the numbers prove it. Organisations with mature service awareness make strategic decisions 10 times faster. They save over £4 million in infrastructure costs over three years just by identifying and eliminating redundancy. They improve development efficiency by 35-40%.

But here's what really matters: they shift from being a cost centre to being a strategic differentiator. They turn their technology estate into a competitive advantage.

That's Pillar One.

Pillar Two: Operational Intelligence

Or: From noise to signal

The second pillar is Operational Intelligence.

Now, this one's close to my heart, because it's about design. It's about the thing we obsessed over at Apple: removing the unnecessary, revealing the essential.

Here's the situation in most operations centres today. They're drowning. Absolutely drowning in data.

Thousands of events per minute. Hundreds of alerts per hour. Monitoring tools everywhere, each one screaming for attention. And the operations team is sitting there trying to figure out what matters.

It's like trying to have a conversation at a rock concert.

The problem isn't the tools. ServiceNow's Event Management is extraordinary. The AIOps capabilities are genuinely revolutionary—machine learning, anomaly detection, automated correlation. It's incredible technology.

But it's deaf without service awareness.

Let me show you what I mean.

Without service awareness, an alert comes in: "Database CPU at 95%." Is that important? Maybe. Maybe not. The operations team has to investigate. They pull up monitoring dashboards. They check recent changes. They look at dependencies. Twenty minutes later, they determine it's a critical production database supporting the e-commerce platform. Twenty minutes to understand what should have been immediate.

Now watch this.

With service awareness, the same alert comes in, but the system knows the context. It knows that database supports the Production E-Commerce Service Instance, which in turn supports the Customer Order Processing Business Service, which has an SLA commitment of 99.9% uptime and serves 50,000 customers.

The alert doesn't say "Database CPU at 95%." It says: "CRITICAL: Production Customer Order Processing service degraded. 50,000 customers affected. SLA at risk. Estimated revenue impact: £25,000 per hour."

See the difference?

One is data. The other is intelligence.

And it gets better. Because once the system understands the service context, the AI becomes truly intelligent. It can correlate alerts not just by timing or text similarity, but by service topology. When alerts spike across the database server, the application server, and the load balancer, it doesn't create three separate incidents. It creates one: "Customer Order Processing service failure - probable root cause: database contention."

This isn't incremental improvement. This is a different category of capability.

The outcomes are staggering. Organisations reduce Priority 1 incidents by 25-67%. They cut Mean Time to Resolution by 30% or more. They save £3 million over three years just from downtime avoidance.

But the real magic—the thing that matters most—is what happens to the operations team. They stop being reactive firefighters. They become proactive service guardians. They shift from "something broke, now what?" to "this service is about to degrade, let's prevent it."

That's what I mean by Operational Intelligence. It's the difference between noise and signal. Between data and insight. Between reactive and proactive.

That's Pillar Two.

Pillar Three: Customer Obsession

Or: The only thing that matters

Now we come to the third pillar. And this one's simple.

It's about the customer. It's always been about the customer.

A previous customer, where we rolled out a Service Aware model, had a saying: "Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." Not the other way around. Never the other way around.

Most IT organisations have this exactly backwards. They start with the technology—the tickets, the assets, the infrastructure—and they try to bolt on customer service at the end.

And it shows.

When a user calls the service desk, what happens? The agent asks questions. Lots of questions. "What system are you using? What error did you get? When did it start?" Five minutes of interrogation before they even understand what service the user is trying to access.

This is not customer obsession. This is customer frustration.

Now, here's what happens with service awareness.

The user calls. The system already knows they're a subscriber to the Corporate Email Service - Gold Tier offering. It knows that service is currently healthy. It knows the user's last five tickets. It knows the relevant knowledge articles.

Before the agent says a word, they have context. They understand the customer's expectations, their service commitments, their history. The conversation starts with empathy and understanding, not interrogation.

But it goes deeper than that.

With service awareness, you can make and measure promises.

You can say: "For the Corporate Email Service - Gold Tier, we commit to 99.9% uptime and two-hour response time for critical issues." And you can track whether you're keeping that promise. Every day. Every hour.

You can be proactive. When that Production E-Commerce Service starts to degrade, you don't wait for customers to call. The system automatically identifies all subscribers, creates a proactive communication, and notifies them: "We're aware of intermittent issues with order processing and are working on resolution."

And here's the beautiful part—the integration that really matters. When you connect ServiceNow's IT Service Management with Customer Service Management, both backed by the same service-aware model, you create something magical: a unified view of the customer experience.

When a customer reports an issue with your mobile app, the support agent can see it's linked to an internal Service Instance that's currently experiencing issues. When IT fixes the underlying service, Customer Service can reach out proactively: "We've resolved the issue you reported. Thank you for your patience."

Seamless. Integrated. Human.

The numbers tell the story. Customer satisfaction increases by 6%. Users save 15 minutes per service request. That's £1.3 million in productivity savings over three years.

But those are just numbers. What really matters is this: you shift from managing tickets to managing relationships. From technical support to service delivery. From cost centre to value centre.

That's Customer Obsession. That's Pillar Three.

One More Thing: The Foundation That Changes Everything

Now, you might be thinking: "This sounds great, Chris, but how do we actually do this?"

And that brings me to the foundation. The thing that makes all of this possible.

It's called the Common Service Data Model. CSDM.

Now, I'm going to be honest with you. When I first encountered this, my reaction was: "That's a terrible name." Common Service Data Model. It sounds like something a committee came up with. It sounds bureaucratic and boring.

But here's the thing about CSDM. It's one of the most important architectural decisions you'll make. And like all great architecture, when it's done right, it's invisible. You don't see it. You just experience the benefits.

Think about it like this.

When Steve Jobs and Apple designed the iPhone, they didn't just throw together a bunch of components. They designed an integrated architecture. The hardware and software worked together. The processor, the operating system, the applications—all designed to work as one coherent system.

That integration is what made the iPhone magical. You didn't think about files and directories and system processes. You thought about photos and messages and music. The architecture made the experience possible.

CSDM is the architecture for service awareness. It's the blueprint that tells ServiceNow how to understand your business.

It defines seven domains—Foundation, Ideation & Strategy, Design & Planning, Build & Integration, Service Delivery, Service Consumption, and Manage Portfolio—and it prescribes exactly how data should flow through them.

It says: "A Business Service is published as a Business Service Offering, which depends on a Service Instance, which is composed of Applications and Infrastructure CIs."

That's not just data modelling. That's a service-aware dependency map. It's the golden thread that connects strategy to operations, business to technology, promise to delivery.

And here's what's important: ServiceNow's most powerful capabilities—Application Portfolio Management, Event Management, AIOps, AI Control Tower—are all architected on the assumption that this model is in place.

Without CSDM, these capabilities don't just degrade. They fail. They fail catastrophically.

Application Portfolio Management can't calculate technology risk because it can't trace the path from business application to underlying technology.

Event Management can't show service impact because it can't map infrastructure failures to business services.

AIOps can't intelligently correlate because it lacks the service topology to understand relationships.

The AI Control Tower—which is supposed to govern your AI assets—can't assess business criticality because it doesn't know which services the AI supports.

This isn't about best practices. This is about the platform's architectural assumptions. You either align with them, or you're fighting the system.

Now, here's the good news. You don't have to do this all at once. In fact, you shouldn't.

The path is simple: Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly.

Crawl: Start with your 25-50 most critical applications. Define them as Business Applications. Create their Service Instances. Link them together. That's your foundation. 90 to 120 days.

Walk: Layer in your technical services—database management, network services, infrastructure hosting. Map these to the applications they support. Now you've got the support structure. Another 120 days.

Run: Engage the business. Define the Business Services and Service Offerings that users consume. Document the commitments. Connect them to the underlying technology. Now you're service-aware. Another 120 days.

Fly: Connect to strategy. Map Business Capabilities and Value Streams. Link applications to strategic objectives. Now you're using technology as a competitive advantage. Ongoing.

Twelve to eighteen months to transformation. That's not a project. That's a journey. And it's a journey worth taking.

Because here's the reality: the organisations that embrace service awareness are going to pull away from those that don't. The gap is going to widen. Fast.

We Have an Accelerator For You

The AI Expert Model

Here's what we've built at Eclipseai.ai 

Most organisations take 12 to 18 months to implement CSDM because they're starting from scratch—they're discovering applications, cataloguing services, mapping relationships, one painful step at a time.

But what if you've already done that work?

What if you've already identified your applications, your services, your support structures—you just don't know it yet? That's where this changes everything. We've created an AI expert that doesn't just understand CSDM v5—it has perfect recall of every relationship, every table, every adoption stage, every best practice from ServiceNow's own documentation.

It can look at your messy Excel spreadsheets, your informal service lists, your scattered application inventory, and instantly see the architecture underneath. It sees what you've already built. And then—and this is the magical part—it doesn't just tell you what's wrong.

It shows you exactly how to transform what you have into a complete, operational CSDM implementation in 4 to 6 months instead of 18.

It gives you the migration scripts. It draws your service architecture. It maps your dependencies. It validates your relationships against the standard. It's like having the world's leading CSDM architect sitting next to you, with photographic memory of every implementation pattern, every table relationship, every pitfall to avoid, working at the speed of thought.

This isn't a chatbot. This is compressed expertise. This is what happens when you combine authoritative knowledge with systematic thinking and give it the ability to analyse your actual data. And that—that's how you turn 18 months into 6.

The Choice

Let me bring this home.

We're living through the most significant technology transformation in business history. AI, automation, digital services—these aren't future trends. They're here. They're now.

And every one of these capabilities depends on something fundamental: context. Understanding. Service awareness.

Your AI agents can't intelligently route incidents if they don't understand which service is affected.

Your automation can't safely make changes if it can't assess service impact.

Your chatbots can't personalise support if they don't know what services the user consumes.

Service awareness isn't a feature. It's not a nice-to-have. It's the foundation of modern IT operations.

The organisations that get this—that truly commit to becoming service-aware—are going to achieve remarkable things. They're going to operate with 10 times the efficiency. They're going to prevent outages before they happen. They're going to deliver experiences that delight customers.

They're going to turn their ServiceNow investment into a strategic differentiator.

The organisations that don't? They're going to wonder why their expensive platform isn't delivering value. They're going to keep fighting fires. They're going to stay stuck in reactive mode.

They're going to keep driving that Ferrari in first gear.

So here's my question to you:

Which organisation do you want to be?

• Do you want to manage components, or do you want to manage services?

• Do you want to be technology-aware, or do you want to be service-aware?

• Do you want incremental improvement, or do you want transformation?

The choice is yours. The path is clear. The tools are ready.

The question is: are you ready?

Postscript: The ROI Reality

Look, I know some of you are thinking about the money. So let's talk about it.

Independent research—not ServiceNow's marketing, but actual third-party Forrester Total Economic Impact studies—shows that organisations with mature service awareness achieve 195% return on investment with payback in under a year.

They reduce Priority 1 incidents by 25-67%.

They cut Mean Time to Resolution by 30% or more.

They save over £7 million in combined infrastructure, productivity, and downtime avoidance over three years.

But here's what I want you to understand: those numbers don't capture the real value.

The real value is in the things you can do that you couldn't do before. The strategic decisions you can make. The risks you can avoid. The experiences you can deliver.

The real value is in becoming the kind of organisation that can compete in the digital age.

And you can't put a price on that.

Because that's not ROI. That's survival.

Free CSDM assessment from our CSDM AI Expert