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To ITIL® V3 and Beyond: Travels with Rob Stroud
October 2007 - Posts
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Promoting the CMDB to CMS
IT tools with sticking power sometimes outgrow their original names and graduate to become "Management Systems." Anti-virus tools became Security Management Systems. Network monitors became Performance Management Systems. Consider the CMDB. Is it time for the CMDB to become a Configuration Management System (CMS)? Let me put a stake in the ground and say, "it depends."
In ITIL® v2, the CMDB evolved into a repository of Configuration Items (CIs), which are the components that make up the IT infrastructure. The CMDB held relationship and dependency information needed to perform analysis to solve system problems quickly, prevent outages, and provide visibility into the impact of changes.
ITIL v3 elevates the CMDB to the more business-aligned CMS by focusing on business value rather than infrastructure components.
A large global financial institution I met with is using a CMDB to assist change management processes by understanding CIs and gauging the impact of CI changes on production. A change was being made to a piece of code running on an application server. The change looked simple enough, but the server was shared and bringing down the server would have brought down a critical business application. A business decision was made to mitigate that risk. The institution's Change Advisory Board (CAB) determined that a business application so vital to the survival of the organization should reside on another server and necessitate a contingency plan to ensure acceptable service levels are maintained.
The CMS moniker conveys that the CMDB, when used as a part of an overall system, goes beyond storing CIs to supporting business strategy. The business value is not in a database of CIs on its own, but rather in a system where the database of CIs is considered with processes that leverage that data in support of the business.
The CMS is more than the CMDB and reflects the infusion of good IT Service Management (ITSM) practices. Many people that say that they have implemented a CMDB have actually implemented all or part of a CMS.
I think that the use of CMS versus CMDB depends on the extent to which sophisticated analysis that is helpful to the business is performed. Of course, CMDBs that come complete with analysis and reporting tools are more likely to bring value to the business. But a vanilla homegrown database of CIs can also perform as a CMS, though more manual effort will be needed to yield tangible results.
Configuration Management Systems are described in detail in the ITIL v3 Service Transition volume. Take a look.
ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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CMDB Survey Results
In my travels and in this blog I have noted the widespread interest I've encountered in the CMDB. Though there is not a lot of quantifiable data available on CMDB use, my own observations are validated in a survey conducted by Freeform Dynamics.
My webcast on the survey, co-hosted by Martin Atherton of Freeform Dynamics, is available as a replay and is one of the most highly attended webcasts I have ever conducted on a CMDB-related topic. I take that to mean that IT professionals are thirsty for data to back the claims of widespread CMDB adoption.
The survey found that 20% of respondents have a CMDB project in progress and an additional 25% plan to implement a CMDB in the next six to 18 months. The survey also found that 75% of large enterprises and 60% of organizations overall will have some form of CMDB implementation underway in 18 months time.
Clearly, the numbers back what I've personally witnessed--that organizations are adopting CMDBs to enhance the stability of their IT infrastructures and insure against costly system down-time. Still, the high adoption numbers reported in the survey shocked even me.
Though popularized in ITIL® v2, some CMDB demand is not ITIL-driven at all. While to some CMDB=ITIL, many IT organizations I've spoken with who are not pursuing ITIL initiatives are adopting CMDBs to simply help them manage change, the ever-present threat to IT infrastructure stability.
Key to the success of full CMDB market acceptance is the ability to yield short-term deliverables that increase stakeholder buy-in. In planning meetings, I often recommend that implementations have some focus on delivering quick wins, which go a long way toward building project support and enthusiasm. In fact, it may be that the CMDB's ability to deliver some quick and useful results is what's driving IT professionals to kick the tires.
Your personal experience may or may not agree with the survey findings, but the resulting white paper is quite interesting. You'll need to register for the link, but I hope that won't stop you from taking a look.
ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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