Designing a CMDB: Buyers Beware! |
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Tuesday, 30 June 2009 11:56 |
 Tips for designing a CMDB
Have you ever purchased a generic, "one-size-fits-all" suit off the rack with the hope it fits you perfectly? You typically find the suit doesn't fit and then you end up not wearing it, or trying to fix it yourself and ultimately end up unhappy with your purchase.
The alternative is to go to a store and design your suit to fit you perfectly with the help of the tailor and designer who takes your measurements, asks you what you need the suit for (what is driving your to make the purchase), where you are going to wear it, what you want to wear with it, etc. The point is, if you buy something generic and expect it to suit your needs exactly and immediately, you're usually in for big disappointment.
Such can be argued is the case with a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Buying a CMDB without designing for it for up front first can result in buyer's remorse. Buying a CMDB and expecting to "plug and play" will end in a bad relationship between customer and vendor when customer expectations are not met. How can you avoid this? You need to plan and shop around.
Organizations that purchase a CMDB do so for many different reasons. You rarely find two organizations that invest in a CMDB for the same reason. Consequently, there isn't a one-size-fits-all CMDB. Understanding this fact, is step one to a successful CMDB experience.
There are several points to consider when deciding to invest in a CMDB. As an organization, use the following as a check list and include all the relevant stakeholders like your Configuration Management Team (hopefully one exists), Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Service Level Management and others. And don't forget the business side to help define and understand your services!
Planning Checklist:
- Have you defined why you really need a CMDB? What is the business challenge you are trying to address with this investment?
- Did you measure where you are starting from? If you don't, how will you know if you have seen improvements?
- Do you have a team in place to manage the CMDB and Configuration Management?
- What about Change Management? Are you positive your change management process is at the right level of maturity to be able to manage any critical components you are going to house in the CMDB?
- Have you defined your scope? What is the scope of services to be mapped to the component level in your CMDB? What is critical that you want to control in your CMDB?
- Where is your data? How confident are you that the data that will go into the CMDB is accurate and complete?
- How are you going to manage the data?
- What is driving this? Are you looking for a proactive solution or do you need to add to your arsenal of reactive solutions?
All of the above are critical questions to ask yourself as an organization prior to buying a CMDB and can help save a lot of headaches and speed the time to value when this type of planning occurs up front.
Once you are ready with answers, manage your CMDB shopping experience as a project and use good project management practices along the way.
Designing for your CMDB is like selecting a good tailor in that you will sometimes need the help of experts who have successfully assisted other organizations with CMDB initiatives. A good approach for designing a CMDB should include the following design elements:
- Develop a Configuration Management Service Improvement Plan
- Manage the project using good Project Management practices (PRINCE2, PMI)
- Formalize a Configuration Management team (roles/responsibilities/performance metrics)
- Develop a project charter for Configuration Management
- Re assess the maturity of Change Management
- Define services - conduct a service mapping exercise and ask: "what are our services," "what are our critical services," and map them to the component level
- Identify the scope for the CMDB based on the services exercises
- Identify data sources for in scope configuration items
- Cleanse the data
- Identify the family/class/relationship structure that is manageable and controlled
- Define and formalize policies
- Load in the test environment
- Transition to production
- Monitor and track compliance to the processes (Configuration and Change)
- Increase scope and repeat
- Formally conduct the verification and auditing activities of Configuration Management
An important note is that lot of organizations struggle with defining their services. When defining services, there are really four common key elements to defining services:
- IT infrastructure
- Applications
- Information
- People
A CMDB is valuable because it allows you to see the relationships between these four key elements of a service and help you manage the elements. The glue between the four elements is the process; the process binds all the elements together.
Let's take email as a service, for example. The infrastructure element of email is the physical server, the router, etc. The application element of the email is typically Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. The information element can include previous incidents for email, policies, procedures, etc. The people element is who owns and manages the email service as a whole. It is important to understand services and elements of a service prior to a CMDB investment to ensure your purchase is fit for purpose.
In summary, these are just a few tips to remember when embarking on a Configuration Management and CMDB initiative. The key points to remember are plan, do, check and act. Sound familiar? It's the cycle of continual improvement and is a critical success factor in any service improvement project. Addressing the types of business challenges that a CMDB and Configuration Management solution can help solve can be rewarding and valuable to an organization; if done right from the beginning.
Remember: If you buy yourself a suit and have it well tailored to your purpose and body type, that suit can be useful for multiple occasions and span many fashion decades. But if you buy something off the rack without planning for your needs you may find that you only wear it once or twice before it falls apart or you realize, it never fit your needs to begin with.
Nancy Hinich-Gualda is a Principal Consultant for CA where she advises senior management of customer organizations to identify the opportunity for ITIL and other best practices and implementation programs for business service improvements. She has 10 years IT experience and holds the ITIL Manager's Certificate in IT Service Management. She is a proven IT professional with a solid background in information systems, ITIL consultancy and Service Delivery Management.
William Gualda is a Principal Consultant for CA and ITSM practitioner for the last 10 years. He has actively engaged on Service Management projects focused around adoption of ITIL with several of the Fortune 500. His extensive practical knowledge of CMDB and governing processes has helped many organizations design and implement CMDBs successfully. His primary focus at CA has been advising clients how to successfully plan, design and implement CA Service Management solutions.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 14:43 |
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