As my automation journey with Service Now has continued I found myself wondering isn’t there a way to make things easier for people by creating a catalog that can call on other catalogs to get the job done. I mean why fill out multiple catalogs if you are essentially going to be entering in the same information.

After discussion with some of my colleagues it turns out there are a couple of options for this.

Order Guide: This is an awesome tool if you want to run parrallel catalogs with no dependency on each other. Cascading variables enable you to pass down the information to all of its subsequent catalogs and there is a way to logically expose the necessary catalogs as needed. Some helpful links – establishing an order to the catalogs in the order guide – https://servicenowguru.com/system-definition/order-request-items-order-guide/

SubFlow workstreams: This is the more classical approach in that you want to control your subflows in a certain manner. All of the logic and control is yours and you can pass variables via client scripts as well as scratchpad variables. You can also simplify your workflows into smaller chunks to make it easier to read and reuse.

I will come back to this when I have more details on each of these items.