Business Transaction Management Blog

CMDB Dead on Arrival?

September 3, 2009 at 10:58 am Motti Tal Leave a comment

You know those weeks when ten different people happen to talk about the very same thing from five different angles? Well last week was CMDB week for me, and this week already started with the same topic on three different calls and five email threads.

Every customer, integrator, vendor and analyst with whom I spoke had a similarly sad story to tell. Projects that start with great expectations, ranging from pre-change impact assessment to post change operational business impact analysis and from business architecture mapping to technical application component dependency insight. Then varying degrees of positive experiences using the automated discovery tools to populate the CIs and their technical dependencies. And then a frustrating disillusionment. It becomes clear that these maps are not going to provide more than marginal value that hardly justifies the effort, and the great leap into real business service mapping must be taken.

Some take a “boil the ocean” approach. They spend the next three months with several people trying to map one business service such as “Online client support” top to bottom down to the granular service as consumed by users. All this time and effort is spent only to discover that the maps are incomplete due to reasons such as “it would take months just to reverse-engineer that old piece of black box we kept from the legacy system”. They are inaccurate due to reliance on “hard data” such as “I think we that for time deposit services we use the TXMP CICS transaction to do interest rate calculations, but not really sure, need to look at the programs…” And the worst of all, even the best maps no longer describe reality three months into the project because the application has already changed twice and the infrastructure setup once!

Others take the “let’s start with some high level maps” approach. Good on paper, and somewhat easier to implement, these approaches end up creating high level maps that are as good as telling you a tornado is impacting the state of Ohio now! Well it’s a pretty big state to go looking for the impacted communities and by the time you start the search based on this “mapping” 911 will already tell you who’s been impacted. The common response from management to status updates on these projects is ”want to tell me we invested all of this effort and money to uncover issues we already knew about?”

Bottom line: People with the best intentions to put CMDBs in the center of their IT alignment initiatives and power effective configuration, and problem change management processes that truly put them on a path to better service quality and improved operation efficiencies, are finding themselves in a tough spot. Projects are being scrapped, put on hold, and alternatives are being desperately sought.

It was gratifying to be able to share with these folks the experiences of organizations that enjoy truly automated business to IT mapping. As described in a previous post “Does change management impact your infrastructure or your business? – BTM adds tremendous value to the mapping of services to CIs. It not only provides these benefits standalone, which is a great approach to justifying CMDB projects if you have not engaged in one yet, but can also salvage failing and stalled CMDB initiatives and resurrect the confidence in their value to the business.
While clinically dead on arrival, a shot of BTM can definitely revive CMDB.

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BSM, CMDB.