To achieve success in IT Service Management, an organization must posess a properly built, fed, and maintained Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CMDB is a federated resource for information about assets, services, and resources throughout your environment. The CMDB is the focus of some important questions:

• What should be in my CMDB?
• How will I source the information I need?
• How can I judge the accuracy of the information I am seeing?

And most importantly:

• How do I build a CMDB from what I have?

Fruition Partners provides a CMDB Roadmap to lay out the degree of complexity you need, the ingredients for assembly of relevant data, and the levels of maturity between current state and your CMDB goal. The Roadmap guides your organization through specific states of CI management. At each level of maturity, progress is assessed, and if necessary, priorities are reassigned.

The Roadmap minimizes growing pains and helps you coordinate an effort which reaches across departments, offices and functions, directing process change and cultural change to ensure success.

The following is a brief overview of the CMDB Roadmap process:

• Research
  • Determine current information sources
  • Document current systems and processes
  • Examine existing tools
• Analyze
  • Examine redundancies and gaps, apply rules to resolve conflicts
  • Align current projects and define gaps
  • Define necessary changes
  • Determine end and midpoint goals
  • Analyze tools on market (if necessary)
  • Develop reporting capacity based on predicted data availability
• Implement
  • Leverage or enhance existing tools where possible
  • Implement new tools by replacing existing functionality prior to full automation
  • Assess progress against tactical and strategic goals throughout the implementations
  • Continuously examine process for potential improvement

For more information about the CMDB Roadmap, please contact us.