To ITIL® V3 and Beyond: Travels with Rob Stroud

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.  

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