CMDB Investment

I talk often about the CMDB.

The reason: if you can’t get the CMDB right, it’s tough to do Service Management well.

Consider the following reasons:
1. Your CMDB will establish scope for your configuration items (CIs) and their attributes. This establishes the scope for what is a Change or Incident, and other processes/practices.

2. The relationships in the CMDB are leveraged to make decisions in the other processes and practices. How to assess the risk of a Change is a good example. Imagine how a good CMDB enables those outcomes versus a bad one.

3. The governance and accuracy of the CMDB determines how well the other processes/practices can be governed. Consider how difficult it would be to resolve Incidents on things in your environment that are not in the CMDB.

4. There are many more, but I will end with this one. When we want to calculate service uptime, costing, or performance (SLA), you must have a quality CMDB first.

Invest in the CMDB first and foremost. It drives quality elsewhere.