There has been much discussion in the ITIL community about the promise of Business and IT integration which most practitioners I suspect pay "lip service" to as they start their bottom up implementation that ultimately leads to CMDB. I was speaking to my good colleague at CA - Ram Melkote (who is one of the many CMDB guru's at CA) about this and how to accelerate the Business and IT integration. I found the conversation extremely valuable and thought that I would share the essence of what we discussed (Ram I am sure will comment and correct any errors or omissions).
The strategy that a business adopts determines the long term direction of the enterprise. For instance, should an enterprise adopt a strategy that not only defends but also grows the profitability of the business vis-à-vis its competition. The organization should build competitive advantage by either choosing sound cost leadership strategy or one of differentiation and acknowledging that over time differentiation if not innovated will become commoditization. Enterprises that adopt a strategy of differentiation build deep core competencies that drive value creation in the form of multiple products offered to the marketplace. The organization strategy designs processes and configures resources to support the chosen business strategy.
The configurations chosen for services and mapped to the CMDB as CIs (Configuration Items), impacts many of the ITIL processes. Standardizing configurations drives economies of scale across multiple ITIL processes and are easier to establish and maintain. Incidents, problems, and changes on similar configurations can be diagnosed, planned, and executed more efficiently. Standard configurations also lead to more economical purchasing as higher volumes can be leveraged to drive discounts. On the other hand, services that need non-standard configurations may need non-standard purchasing agreements, special set-up and maintenance.
Given a particular service, the business strategy drives the configuration decision. If the business pursues a cost leadership strategy, standardization is of the utmost importance. Non-standard configurations drive down benefits of economies of scale and are used sparingly. Alternatively, business could pursue a differentiation strategy. In this case, IT services that support business processes that contribute to the core competency of the enterprise warrant special non-standard configurations depending on the service level agreements that these services should support. Other IT services can use standard configurations.
The CMDB models the relationships between the business processes, IT services, and supporting infrastructure. It also stores the configurations of the services and supporting infrastructure. The CMDB hence should cater to two kinds of baselines:
- Shared Baselines: That store standard configurations and would apply to multiple CIs to drive economies of scale.
- Unique Baselines: That store configuration for a single CI to support non-standard configurations.
Departure from these Baselines should be tracked through your incident management system and remedied.
Public sector IT has very similar challenges. They have to cater to standard IT configurations to reduce cost and increase efficiencies. On the other hand, they have to configure the services that support critical services to the citizens commensurate with the requirements in the SLAs.