Domain separation and Operational Sustainability Management

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Domain Separation and Operational Sustainability Management

    Domain separation in ESG Management allows you to logically group data, processes, and administrative tasks, enhancing data security and management. It enables separation of user access, ensuring that only authorized users can view certain data, which is crucial for organizations wanting to enforce data segregation between different business entities while maintaining global reporting and processes in a single instance.

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    Key Features

    • Data Segregation: Enforces strict data separation between different business units.
    • Custom Processes: Allows customization of business process definitions and user interfaces for each domain, enabling delegated administration.
    • Visibility Control: Users can choose to expand or collapse domain scopes to manage data visibility effectively.
    • Domain-Specific Records: Records are generated based on the user’s domain, ensuring that users only access relevant data.
    • Domain-Separated Tables: Includes specific tables that support domain separation, such as Disclosure and Goal related tables.

    Key Outcomes

    By effectively utilizing domain separation, ServiceNow customers can:

    • Ensure that ESG data remains confidential and specific to each department, preventing cross-departmental data sharing.
    • Maintain clean and organized data relevant to users’ specific domains, enhancing operational efficiency.
    • Facilitate regulatory compliance by maintaining appropriate data segregation.
    • Leverage the benefits of multi-tenancy within a single instance while understanding that some global settings will remain shared across all domains.

    For complete separation of system properties, separate instances are recommended if global reporting and processes are not required.

    Domain separation is supported for ESG Management. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

    Support level: Basic

    • Business logic: Ensure that data goes into the proper domain for the application’s service provider use cases.
    • The application supports domain separation at run time. The domain separation includes separation from the user interface, cache keys, reporting, rollups, and aggregations.
    • The owner of the instance must set up the application to function across multiple tenants.

    Sample use case: When a service provider (SP) uses chat to respond to a tenant-customer’s message, the customer must be able to see the SP's response.

    For more information on support levels, see Application support for domain separation.

    Overview of domain separation

    Domain separation is useful for users who:
    • Enforce absolute data segregation between business entities (data separation).
    • Customize business process definitions and user interfaces for each domain (delegated administration).
    • Maintain global processes and global reporting in a single instance.
    These users can choose to expand or collapse the domain scope to show or hide data from other domains.
    Note:
    Users always have access to data from domains that have been explicitly granted to them by domain visibility.

    How domain separation works in ESG Management

    While ESG Management supports separation of data, separation of logic and process is not fully supported. Many types of records in the ESG Management application are automatically generated through user processes. Integrations with Project Portfolio Management and GRC: Metrics can create and associate data automatically. For records that are automatically and manually generated, the domain of the record is the same as the domain of the user responsible for creating or generating the records. Users must ensure that they are creating and generating records at the right domain level so that they are visible to the right set of users.

    For example, suppose you have domains that look like:
    • Global
    • TOP
      • Domain A
      • Domain B

    If you have ESG goals, material topics and targets that you want to be assessed by users in domains A and B, the ESG goals, material topics and targets should be manually created at the global level. If ESG goals, material topics and targets are created in Domain B, you will not be able to use them in Domain A due to indexing.

    If you have ESG goals, material topics and targets that you want to be assessed by users in Top and Domain A, you can create the risk or control in Domain A. Unless the ESG goals, material topics and targets are in the Global domain, users must not assign risks or controls in a higher domain to users in a lower domain. In the example given, if you have an ESG goal in the Top domain, you should not assign it to program manager in Domains A or B since those users would not have access to the this goal.

    Domain separated tables

    The following is the list of domain separated tables:
    • Disclosure
    • Disclosure Summary
    • Goal Activity Summary
    • Heatmap Chart Color
    • Composite Metric Definition to Citation
    • Composite Metric Definition to Goal
    • Composite Metric Definition to Target
    • Control to Goal
    • Control Objective to Goal
    • Citation to Disclosure
    • Metric to Disclosure
    • Metric Definition to Disclosure
    • Entity to Goal
    • Goal to Citation
    • Goal to Disclosure
    • Material Topic to Goal
    • Metric to Citation
    • Metric Definition to Citation
    • Metric Definition to Goal
    • Metric Definition to Target
    • Metric to Goal
    • Metric to Target
    • Policy to Goal
    • Risk to Goal
    • Risk Statement to Goal
    • Material Topic

    For more information on these tables, see Components installed with Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG Management).

    Use case

    ESG data can be separated from the data of other departments. Each business area using the ESG Management application can have separate data that cannot be shared with other departments. Therefore, each department can have its own goals, targets, material topics, and so on. When looking at a goal from the ESG domain, the user can choose to expand the domain scope to show values from the ESG domain or collapse the domain scope to show only goals that match the ESG domain. By default, domain separation adds a domain field to the Task [task]and Configuration Items [cmdb_ci] tables and their extensions. You can extend domain separation to any new tables you create by adding a sys_domain field to the table's dictionary definition. By default, the system only domain-separates platform and baseline application tables where appropriate.
    Note:
    ServiceNow® does not recommend domain separating platform tables such as any table with the sys_ prefix such as the Dictionary Entry [sys_dictionary] and Dictionary Entry Override [sys_dictionary_override] tables because it can produce unexpected results.
    In this use case, client scripts, business rules, workflows, processes, and so on can be domain-separated. While the behavior offered with domain separation provides multi-tenancy support, multi-tenancy is still contained within a single instance. This means that some global properties, some global data, and some global processes are shared across all domains. For example, the system’s “Remember me” option on the login page is global and cannot be specified per domain. If you need complete and total separation of all system properties and do not require global reporting or global processes, separate instances are the best option.