The ever-increasing IT complexity is obvious to every CIO and IT employee, and it is now becoming more evident at the business level.  Emerging technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, combined with a dependence on technology and the current pressure for cost cutting, have made it critical that IT understand the business services. IT also must understand the technology components, business processes, business service levels, and their relationships. This knowledge makes certain that IT can act dynamically to guarantee that business services are delivered appropriately. To understand these relationships, many corporations have turned to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or Configuration Management System (CMS) to help ensure service availability, understand business impact, and lean up on IT and be confident the business can communicate effectively.

I am a little surprised that most CIO's have has taken so long to adopt standards and best practices, such as ITIL, COBIT and ISO/IEC 20000 and to investigate and roll out CMDBs. The manufacturing industry has taught us the importance of the Bill of Materials or a detailed list of components and the costs associated with them. This helps enable repeatable processes that deliver products of consistent quality at a predictable price.  One organization I was speaking to recently reminded me that IT professionals previously had many of the relationships between IT components and linkages in their heads or documented in a manual. In the past this was fine, because individuals in IT were the interface with the customer or business process and the complexity was less severe than it is today. More importantly, change was less frequent.  All that has radically changed. The advent of technologies, such as virtualization and cloud computing, combined with outsourced components and the dramatic increase in the rate of change demanded by the business adds to the complexity of the computing environment. This has led to missed expectations and diminished confidence in IT.

Another barrier to the implementation of the CMDB has been the definition of the benefits. If a CMDB is implemented simply as a repository of relationships it has minimal value to the organization. The true value is in the understanding of how these relationships impact IT and business services. These services range from service outages - whether planned (such as a change) or unplanned (such as a hardware failure) - to how future changes impact IT services business performance. With the changing delivery environment where multiple suppliers and IT organizations are leveraging current and emerging technologies, the value of a CMDB is becoming clear.  So in summary the value of the CMDB is not in the repository itself, but in the relationships it maps and how IT uses them. 

For instance, a shipping and transportation organization implemented a CMDB and targeted their key business systems.  They had a known problem with a home-grown middleware component. Due to issues with the middleware and system instability, the CIO had implemented a process that any change to a component which leveraged the middleware required testing of all systems that used the middleware prior to implementation.  Although the policy was well known, the challenge for the IT organization was that not all the team was aware of the components that utilized the middleware.  The implementation of the CMDB was targeted at business services that leveraged the middleware.  Results were experienced almost immediately when the CMDB went into production as a service outage was almost immediately linked to a change to a business service which leveraged the middleware allowing the organization to back out an apparently unrelated change and restore service.  The value didn't end there.  The initial value was advertised throughout the organization and the CMDB is now one of the pivotal components in the change process.

The CMDB may be a pivotal component in your journey of business and IT integration but remember it's not the destination.  A brilliant CMDB maybe technically sound, but the real value of the CMDB is in the relationships and how you use the information for your IT Service Management processes such as change, incident and problem management. Ultimately you need to use this information to effectively manage your business.

To learn more about how to achieve Lean IT with new CA solutions including our Service Desk Manager and CMDB visit the Lean IT site!