by Tom Bishop
CIOs and their teams should be asking the same question, "What do we need to do to get the full business value from our Service Management initiatives?" The answer involves making sure the initiatives provide consistent, current, accurate, and secure information. Of course, making that happen will require some effort, but it's time well spent. The first step is to think about how to combine the benefits of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices with a configuration management database (CMDB).
Getting Control
The CMDB can offer IT a heightened level of control over what's happening in their environment. A well-configured CMDB can easily monitor configuration items (CIs) - their location, status, and relationships to each other - and consolidate disparate data sets. It can also provide a single source of accurate information about data in the IT environment. Having this control will strengthen the value of the services that IT provides to the business. For example, a CMDB can offer an accurate picture of available assets and their use. This capability ensures assets are used most effectively, which helps to reduce costs.
ITIL best practices for Service Management include Service Support and Service Delivery disciplines, which depend on the process integration and control from the CMDB. These processes, and how they are related to ITIL, are described in the table at the end of this article. ITIL offers strategic guidance for processes that depend on a CMDB. The ITIL standards recommend using a CMDB because it is a core component of mature, predictable, standard IT Service Management processes.
ITIL Goals for Configuration Management
As IT Service Management matures within an organization, a CMDB becomes even more business-critical, providing the necessary control of processes and information. ITIL has a number of goals for configuration management, which include:
- Account for all the IT assets and configurations within the organization and its services
- Provide accurate information on configurations and their documentation to support all other Service Management processes
- Provide a sound basis for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management
- Provide verification of the configuration records against the infrastructure, and correct any exceptions
CMDB Integration with ITIL and Automated Processes
As organizations add more ITIL-based automated processes, they must ensure that all components seamlessly integrate into the CMDB. If you follow the ITIL disciplines for Service Management, you will increase your chances of using more mature, repeatable processes.
CMDBs are available with ITIL-compatible, preconfigured tools that integrate with supporting applications. This capability lowers the cost to deploy services and increases their effectiveness. For instance, the Service Desk captures events from a variety of different sources. Events are filtered, standardized, and prioritized based on severity, scope of problem, or business impact. This action provides the functionality to open a trouble ticket that the support staff can prioritize, based on the goals and priorities of the ITIL business processes used to filter events. The process is automated and much more repeatable, and eliminates the manual burden typically associated with prioritizing and filtering.
Today, many organizations consider the ability to manage assets as the primary step for getting started with configuration management. Using a CMDB for asset management can significantly reduce costs. Without a CMDB, organizations run the risk of over-provisioning because they cannot track which assets are used for which purposes, or which availability and service problems relate to certain types of assets.
Enhanced Business Value
The examples below demonstrate how a CMDB provides business value through ITIL best practices. Although each ITIL discipline can be implemented as a standalone function, the CMDB extends the value of each by supplying information that extends and integrates functions.
| ITIL Service Management | Discipline CMDB Business Value |
| Incident Management | Extends the value of Incident Management, giving Service Desk technicians access to information about CIs related to incident records. Mean-time-to-restore service is reduced by prioritizing incoming requests, based on business impact or service level agreement, and by providing a broad range of related information needed to quickly restore service. |
| Problem Management | Extends the value of Problem Management by linking incidents and problems, and by linking back to various upstream and downstream CIs. Mean-time-to-repair is reduced by optimizing problem control, error control, known errors, and root-cause analysis. |
| Change Management | In conjunction with a service impact model, extends the value of Change Management by relating all change requests to the specific CI affected by the change, as well as all other related CIs. Change requests can then be categorized by impact, which directs routing, communications, and approvals. |
| Configuration Management | Enables the consistent, accurate, and cost-effective identification, control, status accounting, and verification of all CIs in the CMDB. |
| Release Management | Enables effective and automated Release Management. The CMDB provides accurate information about hardware, software, and current configurations that enable automated software release, as well as back-out procedures and project scheduling. |
| Service Desk | Extends the value of the Service Desk by providing CI details related to each service request. Service levels are improved by reducing errors, reducing manual data collection, and reducing the risk of failure due to changes that impact vital business functions. |
| Service Level Management | Allows end-to-end service-level management that is otherwise limited without a CMDB. Detailed information about CIs, their relationships to each other, and their relationships linked back to IT services enables service level agreements (with the business), operating level agreements (with internal IT groups or external service providers), and underpinning contracts (with external service providers). |
| Capacity Management | Enables comprehensive business capacity management, service capacity management, and resource capacity management. Information about CIs, their relationships with each other, and their relationship to business functions is a prerequisite for automated capacity management and real-time computing frameworks. |
| Availability Management | Provides a central information repository that links availability, reliability, and maintainability for underlying IT components. It then links IT components back to service level agreements, operating level agreements, and underpinning contracts. |
| Financial Management | Provides information that is critical to effective financial management of IT. In conjunction with service definitions in a service catalog, CMDB information enables service-based costing frameworks, which are key components of financial management, by linking into the asset management data that holds the financial records, and into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system holding the fixed asset register. |
| Continuity Management | Provides a central repository of information that enables continuity management. The CMDB stores information about the IT assets and configurations that support the key business processes and identify the priority and agreed-upon minimum level of business operation following a major service disruption. |
Used effectively, the CMDB improves quality of service because all CMDB components and their relationships are clearly understood. The CMDB provides an accurate view of current IT capability, enabling you to quickly discern the status of your entire IT infrastructure and how one interaction impacts another. This ability helps you manage changes more effectively. The knowledge gained through a CMDB, combined with ITIL best practices, provides greater flexibility for the business through an improved understanding of IT Service Support, Service Delivery, and Infrastructure Management. The more information you have, the more flexible your organization can become and the better prepared you are to meet Service Management objectives.
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Tom Bishop, Chief Technology Officer of BMC Software, joined BMC in 2005 from VIEO, Inc., where he served as Chief Technology Officer and was named one of the top 25 CTOs by InfoWorld Magazine in 2004. A well-known technology innovator, he holds nine patents in fault tolerant computing and has been involved in leading the development of industry standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and POSIX.
