Glossary

ServiceNow speak, translated. No jargon walls here.

A C G H I O P R S T

AWA (Advanced Work Assignment): The engine that pushes work to the right agent automatically — by availability, capacity, and skills — instead of agents cherry-picking from a queue. See Advanced Work Assignment (AWA).
Catalog Item: One orderable thing in a service catalog — "MacBook Pro," "VPN access," "new hire onboarding" — with its own form, approvals, and fulfillment workflow. The building block behind every Request (Service Request).
Change: Any addition, modification, or removal that could impact a service — deploying an app, patching a server, swapping network gear. Changes get risk-assessed, approved, and scheduled through Change Management so fixes don't cause the next outage.
CMDB (Configuration Management Database): ServiceNow's inventory of the things your business runs on — servers, apps, laptops, cloud resources — and how they connect. See CMDB Foundation for what it takes to build one.
Configuration Item (CI): One entry in the CMDB: a single tracked thing, like "the payroll server" or "Jane's laptop." Incidents and changes link to CIs so the system knows what's affected.
CSM (Customer Service Management): Supporting your external customers the way ITSM supports employees: intake from any channel, cases tracked to resolution, and front-office work connected to the back-office teams who fix things. See the Customer Service Management (CSM) family.
GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance): Managing enterprise risk and regulatory compliance as continuous programs instead of spreadsheet exercises: risk registers, policies and controls, and internal audit. See the Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) family.
HRSD (HR Service Delivery): The HR team's service desk: employee questions and requests handled as confidential cases, plus automated onboarding/offboarding journeys. See HR Service Delivery (HRSD) and the Employee Service Management (ESM) family.
Incident: An unplanned interruption or degradation of a service — from "my laptop won't start" to "email is down for everyone." The goal is restoring service fast, not finding the root cause (that's a Problem). Handled by Incident Management.
Instance: Your company's own copy of ServiceNow, running in the cloud at its own web address (like yourcompany.service-now.com). Most organizations have at least two: one for real work (production) and one for testing changes safely.
ITAM (IT Asset Management): Managing what you own and what it costs: hardware from purchase to disposal (HAM), software licenses and audit risk (SAM), and non-IT equipment (EAM). See the IT Asset Management (ITAM) family.
ITOM (IT Operations Management): Keeping the IT estate healthy and known: automatically discovering what you run, correlating monitoring alerts into action (Event Management), and mapping infrastructure to business services (Service Mapping). See the IT Operations Management (ITOM) family.
ITSM (IT Service Management): How an IT department supports the business: handling outages (incidents), fixing root causes (problems), and making changes safely (changes). The most common starting point for ServiceNow. See the IT Service Management (ITSM) family.
OTM (Operational Technology Management): Extending asset, service, and security management to industrial systems — the machines and controllers that run factories and utilities, where safety and uptime rules differ sharply from IT. See Operational Technology Management (OTM).
Problem: The underlying cause behind one or more incidents — the thing that keeps breaking. A problem record tracks the investigation, the temporary workaround, and the permanent fix. Handled by Problem Management.
Request (Service Request): Asking for something new — a laptop, software access, a password reset — as opposed to reporting something broken (an Incident). Requests are fulfilled from a service catalog of catalog items with predefined approval and fulfillment steps.
SecOps (Security Operations): The security team's workflows on the platform: responding to security incidents (SIR), prioritizing vulnerabilities (Vulnerability Response (VR)), and enriching investigations with threat intel. See the Security Operations (SecOps) family.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Letting people log in to ServiceNow with the same company login they already use everywhere else (via tools like Azure AD/Entra or Okta), instead of another username and password. Set up during Platform Core Setup.
SPM (Strategic Portfolio Management): Planning work at the portfolio level: capturing ideas (Demand Management), running projects (PPM), staffing them (Resource Management), and connecting it all to strategy (Strategic Planning). Formerly called ITBM. See the IT Business Management / Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) family.
TNI (Telecom Network Inventory): The authoritative model of a carrier's network — physical equipment, logical services, and how they relate — that telecom order management and assurance depend on. The telecom-grade version of a CMDB. See Telecom Network Inventory.
TSOM (Telecom Service Operations Management): A carrier's network-operations toolkit: detecting network faults and mapping them to the services and customers they affect, using the network inventory (TNI). See Telecom Service Operations Management (TSOM).