Business Transaction Management Blog

CMDB–>CMS–>SKMS: What’s the Problem?

March 31, 2010 at 4:04 pm Linh C. Ho 2 comments

By Linh C. Ho

The problem is too much data, not enough meaningful and actionable information. Data without any context or meaning has limited value. Over the last few years, the perceived answer to managing the wealth of data is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CMDB has been hyped to deliver great value, to help drive IT management decisions however many are still trying to work out how and where to start. IT appears to have focused too much on implementing the technology and not enough attention on taking a strategic business-focused approach. An industry analyst survey confirms that 90% of enterprises that have undertook a CMDB project within the last 3 years; 68% of these projects are still not in full phase production. This statistic illustrates that the time-to-value in achieving a meaningful CMDB is greater than first thought.

Reasons contributing to this issue:

1. Populating and maintaining the CMDB: The bigger challenge is how to maintain the CMDB –Has the auto-discovery tool captured all or only partial detail that was required? What granularity of CI goes into the CMDB? What happens when something changes in the infrastructure? Will it be reflected in the CMDB automatically? Keeping the CMDB content up-to-date and accurate is a big task if it is not populated properly to begin with.

2. Quality and accuracy of the data: IT practitioners quickly realize that the quality and accuracy of the data is not as ‘trustworthy’ as they thought – some CMDBs stem from asset management repositories; the data is in different formats; data originates from different parts of the world and from different toolsets. Since decisions are made and executed based on the information from the CMDB and if the quality/accuracy is questionable, then the project is liable to fail.

3. Manual modeling: While there are auto-discovery tools in the market to help canvass the enterprise or part of it, the issue is how do all these components relate to the critical business services or transactions? From this point on, the process to make sense of the data is typically manual and complex.

4. Limited or no insight of business impact: A standalone CMDB may not provide a true business perspective, mapping critical business services or transactions to the supporting infrastructure components. As a result it has limited value to identify the services and users impacted when performance problems occur.

5. Limited or no insight of change impact: Tied to maintaining the CMDB, a big challenge is to understand the relationships between CIs and how they impact each other when something changes in the environment. Not only does IT need to understand what changed and find the root cause, but during the time of configuration, practitioners need to assess configuration changes in better preparation for execution.

As the market realizes the challenges of implementing the CMDB, analysts, IT management practitioners and the ITIL community are slowly moving away from the CMDB terminology and adopting CMS (Configuration Management System) and SKMS (Service Knowledge Management System). CMS takes a federated approach, where multiple CMDBs (local or remote) come together. SKMS includes other data sources correlated with the CMS information to provide a knowledge layer that is more business-centric than a CMS alone. Other data source can include service desk, end-user experience data, business transaction data, business process information, business activity management, service level agreements, and so on.

Business Transaction Management (BTM), an emerging IT management market segment is quickly being adopted to simplify the complexity of CMDB projects (using either homegrown or commercial CMDBs). In short, BTM automatically populates the CMDB with no manual service modeling, and provides quality and accurate business relevant content. BTM helps IT operations management:

1. Populate the CMDB/CMS automatically and accurately with data that is tied to critical business transactions and services. It enables a true top-down approach to managing your IT services by starting with your critical business transactions and services first. This gives IT a ‘business-driven’ CMDB and a big step into building the service knowledge management system.

2. Automatically maintain the CMDB/CMS with quality and accurate content continuously. BTM will automatically update the CMDB/CMS as changes occur in the infrastructure –running 24/7 in production and collecting data about all transactions that flow through every application tier.

3. Gain business impact analysis to understand how CIs impact critical business transactions and services. BTM maps those relationships automatically to save time and cost. By understanding the business impact, IT can better prioritize problem resolution resources. (e.g. impact on business transactions, cost of transactions, SLAs, processes, end-user experience, geographic locations, transaction resource consumptions).

4. Gain change impact analysis to provide change and configuration management stakeholders critical information for planning and execution of changes. This information helps schedule downtime and avoids costly disruption to the business.

5. Bring business relevant and actionable information to different stakeholders involved in IT service management or affected by it. BTM provides role-based dashboards and reports that give business and IT leaders the information needed to make informed decisions. Stakeholders can be staff from service level management, capacity management, application management and owners, support, financial management among others.

BTM helps IT operations management with an existing CMDB/CMS project or planning to adopt one; achieve quick time to business value and gain a business-driven CMDB/CMS.

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