During the past 12 months I’ve been asked with increasing regularity about the value of Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs). In this post I’m going to summarise my answers to some of these questions I’ve been asked; as always with a bias towards how best to align business and IT.
On that note, it is worth pointing out that a CMDB is focused firmly on IT, not business. Sure there are some business benefits to be gained, but only as a consequence of CMDB implementation forcing change on the management and delivery of IT. The great hope is that these changes will improve IT service, consequentially allowing IT delivery to become something that "just works", allowing IT to have more constructive conversations with the business.
To start with, there follows a brief description of what a CMDB actually is and what it often promises to deliver.
A CMDB forms the basis for much of the delivery mechanisms of ITIL v3. The concept is that you have a repository which holds relevant information about your assets, and how each asset relates to any other asset. An asset, in the context of a CMDB, is termed a Configuration Item (CI) and may be an item of hardware, an application or a service.
So is the CMDB the repository, the data model (how the data in the repository is structured and used), or the data held within it? Unfortunately that depends which vendor is trying to sell you it.
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