From the dWb website

Knowing about your IT bits and pieces

Do you know what you have in your IT estate?

Do you know where all the bits are?

Do you know the configuration of all the pieces?

Do you know how well they are being used?

 Feature Article

Knowing about your IT bits and pieces

These are some of the questions that IT management should be able to answer.  

 Can they? ........ Rarely.

 Even those that follow the ITIL technology management guidelines struggle to have an accurate holistic view of their IT estate.

 Why is this simple and obviously necessary requirement so difficult?

 The normal answer is that the data is available in different systems which cannot be aggregated to provide the required information.

 The real answer is that there is no process owner that needs the information. Operations only need operational data, purchasers only need purchasing data, service desk only need user data, application management only need application data ….. and so it goes on.

 Who needs the holistic view?

 As we move increasingly towards Service management rather than product and infrastructure component management the overall view becomes more and more important. Decisions need to be made with an understanding of the complete environment not just a part of the picture. Knowledge about the dependencies is vital, information about the end-to-end performance is crucial and details about the total estate are fundamental to the change management process.

 What process incorporates all of these requirements? Configuration management.

 Now that is a novel concept.

 To support this mapping of hardware, software, applications, processes, etc. the IT industry has discovered the advantages of CMDB (configuration management database).  To populate it will take effort, to maintain it will take process but most importantly discipline and to exploit it will bring measurable management benefits.

 Having an accurate CMDB will enable better and faster decisions, reduced project and support effort, optimum resource utilisation, improved operation reliability and accurate asset management.

 So why haven’t we already implemented CMDBs?

 The answer is another question - who owns the process?

 So identify the process owner and change the organisation accordingly otherwise you will continue to work in compartments and not have the obvious benefits.