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The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) is the standard for industry best practices for IT Service Management, which includes Service Support and Service Delivery. Service Support is the reference book most commonly used within the IT industry. Service Support, as defined by ITIL, has six main elements:
> The Service Desk
> Incident Management
> Problem Management
> Change Management
> Configuration Management
> Release Management
Each of these six elements integrates with and depends upon the other. Often, integration of applications simply means passing key data from one database into another to ensure the correct information is available to the management process. This exchange creates issues related to duplication and ownership of data. Typically, the solution has been to consolidate this data together into a single database, shared by all relevant service applications, as dictated by a particular process.
A better method is to create a single view accessible by all users, thus ensuring that data owners remain data owners, protecting the existing investment in service support applications by enabling integration in a federated1 manner. This is the idea behind a configuration management database (CMDB).
The term cornerstone can be defined as:
1. A stone that forms the base of a corner of a building, joining two walls
2. A vital part or basis: sugar was the cornerstone of the economy
Whichever definition you prefer, the idea is the same — without the cornerstone, any structure eventually crumbles or fails. The cornerstone concept aptly describes the CMDB within any IT service management solution.
This paper discusses the function, benefits, and importance of a CMDB and why it has become the cornerstone of IT service support. Business Service Management (BSM), the BMC® Software strategy of managing IT from a business perspective, will also be reviewed in conjunction with the award-winning BMC Atrium solution.
A common theme throughout ITIL is the need for a centralized view of IT Service Management data—essential to delivering consistent, reliable, effective, and efficient service to the business customers. This centralized view is referred to as the configuration management database (CMDB).
Adhering to ITIL guidelines, Configuration Management must:
> Account for all the IT assets and configurations within the organization and its services
> Provide accurate information about configurations and their documentation in order to support all other Service Management processes
> Provide a sound basis for Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and Release Management
> Verify the configuration records against the infrastructure, and correct any exceptions
The CMDB is the cornerstone of Service Management whether or not you adopt ITIL standards. When you do not know what infrastructure items you have, where they are, how they are related, their current status and their full history, you cannot effectively manage your IT infrastructure. For example, during the Y2K crisis, some estimates claimed that as much as 70 percent of revenue was spent locating infrastructure asset items and only 30 percent was spent on the necessary technology updates. Today, just five years past Y2K, many organizations are again struggling to identify their infrastructure items in order to comply with governance requirements detailed by Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) or Basel II regulations. With an accurate CMDB and a good Change Management policy, meeting the requirements of Sarbox or Basel II can be accomplished faster and cheaper. Both are about managing operational risk, which, from an IT perspective, can only be done by understanding the IT infrastructure and adhering to the ITIL processes to avoid disruption to the IT services that in turn directly affect vital business functions (VBFs) and the underpinning data.
Cornerstone of Service Support
Most of the information an organization needs to successfully adhere to ITIL guidelines can be housed with a CMDB. ITIL briefly describes a CMDB as:
“A database that contains all relevant details of each Configuration Item (CI) and details of the important relationships between Configuration Items.”
The key phrases here are relevant details and important relationships. Relevant detail refer to the attributes and fields allocated for each CI type. This requires careful planning when designing the CMDB. For a better chance of success, consider the requirements of other ITIL processes when assigning attributes (refer to CMDB Utilization in Table 1 of this paper). Important relationships is a critical factor because it is these relationships that differentiate the CMDB from a simple database, one that contains a list of items and their attributes (e.g., an inventory or asset database).
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