Why CMDB - 7 Fundamental Use Cases

WHITE PAPER: COMMON USE CASES FOR A CMDB

Why Implement aConfiguration ManagementDatabase (CMDB)?Seven Fundamental Use CasesNOVEMBER 2008

David A. Messineo and Malcolm RyderCA SERVICES

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

SECTION 1 2IT Business Alignment — A PragmaticPerspective

The Fundamentals of an IT Business Strategy

IT as the Ultimate Market Enabler

SECTION 2 6The Seven Fundamental Use Cases for a CMDB

Impact Analysis

Root Cause Identification

Change Governance

Auditing and Compliance

Resource Optimization

Services Mapping

Services Performance Planning

SECTION 3 14Tying the Fundamental Use Cases Together

SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS 16

SECTION 5: ABOUT THE AUTHOR 16

Copyright © 2008 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permittedby applicable law, CA provides this document “As Is” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA beliable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages. ITIL® is a RegisteredCommunity Trademark of the Office of Government Commerce and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

WHITE PAPER: COMMON USE CASES FOR A CMDB 1

Executive SummaryChallenge

Information Technology increasingly dictates the behaviors of the business. Thus, astechnology becomes obsolete, so does the business. The IT organization now comes underthe constant business pressure to sustain competitiveness by enabling the business toadapt to marketplace changes through the strategic exploitation of technology. Adoptionof service management practices, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®), leadsbusinesses to emphasize direct support of business growth with their investments intechnology. By incorporating a Configuration Management System (CMS) and itsunderlying Configuration Management Database (CMDB), businesses have taken a majorstep towards creating an information repository to manage the alignment of IT with thebusiness. However, many of these initial deployments have been expensively yieldingunsatisfactory results. To generate discernable value to the firm, management must refocusthe efforts related to ITIL and the CMDB on those elements of the business that create themost value in the marketplace.

Opportunity

The CMDB, as ITIL’s primary information repository, provides a huge opportunity for an ITorganization to focus its operations on business requirements. It requires understandingboth the internal and external forces that are levied on the business and building a robustservice model aligned with the competitive strategy to leverage those forces. Here, successrequires managed commitments, good decision making, and an eye for precision in definingthe kinds of information that weaves the IT operations into the business fabric. Bysupporting the seven fundamental Use Cases described in this white paper, an ITorganization can deploy and support an architecture that more consistently instantiates achosen business model throughout the organization.

Benefits

By carefully constructing a CMDB, the IT organization effectively transcends its legacy asan organization focused on cost reduction into being an engine for leveraging threefundamental IT value dimensions. These are: the management of time, the management ofeconomy, and their effect on overall profitability. IT productively starts its transition to a fullpartner business service firm and value contributor by adopting the language of thebusiness and its manner of recording results. Building a CMDB with the right focus allowsan IT organization to support IT Service Management Best Practices, while simultaneouslydemonstrating its unique ability to drive advantages that are both market-making andcompetitor-crushing.

2 WHITE PAPER: COMMON USE CASES FOR A CMDB

SECTION 1

IT Business Alignment — A Pragmatic PerspectiveThe Fundamentals Of An IT Business StrategyEvery business has a strategy. Some strategies are good, some are not. The degree ofseparation between the good and the bad is often reflected by the extent to which thatstrategy is made explicit and to the degree that the strategy is actionable with existing andplanned resources. Having an actionable strategy is critical to senior IT management becauseit effectively determines the long term direction of an enterprise. It is the longer term thatgenerally concerns IT because of the lag in time between planned and actual benefits. It isthis linkage of time that requires IT to define what being actionable really means.

Time carries no bias; on its own it is neither productive nor unproductive. It cannot bepurchased, stored, created, or removed. But, it must be consumed. Strategy reflects theplanned usage of time, determining its productivity.

The major consumer of time is, effectively, the drive for profitability. An enterprise adopts astrategy that focuses on the profitability of the business in comparison with its competition.It builds its competitive advantage by generally choosing to excel at one of three strategies:product leadership, customer intimacy, or operational excellence. Each strategy has structuralrequirements that determine the path to profitability, and therefore, the usage of time. Alongwith a third variable, economy, it is profitability and time that become the hidden IT valuedimensions of market leadership. Table 1 identifies how each of the key business strategies isimpacted by each IT value dimension.

TABLE A — LIST OF KEY BUSINESS STRATEGIES

How does a company construct an economical organization of time to drive profitability? Anorganization’s strategy, directed by management leadership, identifies critical services andproducts and then assembles processes and resource assignments to support them. In effect,management configures resources to execute the chosen business strategy. IT helps establishthe balance between time, profitability, and economics by providing flexibility to support thethree core business strategies.

Product Leadership

Customer Intimacy

OperationalExcellence

DEFINITION

Focus oninnovation andtime-to-market

Focus on lifetimevalue andcustomer attention

Focus on valueand streamliningoperations

TIME

Reduce time-to-market

Product/ServiceLongevity

Asset Turnover

ECONOMY

Coordinate supplychain

Individualcustomization

Reduce unit cost

PROFITABILITY

Marketcompetitiveness

Customer lock-in

Maximize volume


Regardless of industry approach, every business has three primary operational objectives:

• Running the business Keeping the business viable and profitable is the cornerstone ofrunning a business. The IT organization plays a critical role in ensuring the infrastructure is inplace to maintain economical connections between the provider and the consumers. Greatereconomy motivates consumer investments in adopting better products and services whilereducing the provider’s marginal risks. To bring this about, IT is constantly identifying waysto streamline essential processes in finance, engineering, manufacturing and support forfaster, more reliable and more secure connectivity with customers and suppliers.

• Growing the business Business competitiveness is ultimately about finding new ways togrow revenue while managing costs. On the demand side, business looks to capture newrevenue streams more effectively. IT plays a critical role in managing the economics of newbusiness models, new products and services. IT accelerates the ability to exploit marketplacedynamics through reducing time-to-market. On the supply side, IT improves profitabilitythrough the continual coordination of scarce resources. Thus, IT shapes the balance betweenvalue creation and resource consumption.

• Transforming the business IT plays a critical role in transitioning the business from onemodel to the next through the management of information, the politics of organizationalwork distribution, the enforcement of policies and procedures, and the speed at whichchanges can be absorbed across all stakeholders. IT provides agility, delivering new waysto leverage existing skills and capacities into new lines of business.

Table B shows how these three objectives are impacted by the three IT value dimensions.

TABLE B — LIST OF KEY OPERATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Whether a product or service is no longer needed or the economics of other approaches arebetter, every business is under the constant pressure of simultaneously serving its existingcustomer base and changing its business model to meet new market opportunities. Successfulbusinesses all run, grow, and transform continuously. A business that neglects any of thesethree objectives will inevitably suffer against its competition, in the market, or both. Throughneglect, the well eventually runs empty; cash flows will ultimately dry up.

RUN

GROW

TRANSFORM

DEFINITION

Focus on sustainedoperationalcontinuity

Focus on newand additionalopportunities

Focus onadaptation to newrequirements

TIME

Service LevelManagement

Service Delivery

Service Definition

ECONOMY

Cost management

Risk management

Optimization

PROFITABILITY

Prioritization

Planning

Change


A business with depleted assets, whether the assets are dollars, customers, service providers,staff, or even regulatory protections (like patents), will increasingly find itself uncompetitiveand subject to extinction. As evidenced by the number of traditional companies that are nolonger in business, the dynamics of changing markets require an equal ability to adopt changesin an organization. IT plays a critical role in that endeavor. As technology in an organizationbecomes more obsolete, so does the company.

It As The Ultimate Market EnablerIn many respects, IT is the business. Modern business models require coordination ofresources across value chains, and IT makes it economically viable. Modern business modelsalso require the ability to make decisions quickly and act decisively — while ensuring theproper risk controls are in place. IT enlightens the organization to new ways of decision makingby providing instant visibility and transparency across the organization.

IT is, however, like business in that it is subject to the same challenges. The proper alignmentbetween IT and the business demands the simultaneous transition of business changes withthe dynamic nature of IT and its rapid pace of development. IT is pressured every day to runmore efficiently, react more rapidly, and transform more intelligently. But, experience showsthat these efforts often compete with each other. Where is the appropriate balance betweenoptimizing resources and optimizing agility? What level of planned flexibility will best benefitthe business?

IT creates value by tying together assets, resources, processes, and services. Presently, manyof the challenges presented to IT are managed through the proper application of IT ServiceManagement Best Practices, IT Standards, and Governance Controls, notably ITIL, ISO 20000,and CobiT respectively. Applying these frameworks to practices requires knowledge about ITfrom various perspectives. Central to this knowledge is understanding infrastructure buildingblocks, how these building blocks work in concert, and how they provide the means toorchestrate key IT competencies.

A repository of building blocks (infrastructure objects) is necessary; a set of definedauthoritative models is required. Currently, this management repository is known, in ITILlanguage, as a Configuration Management System or CMS. Its more commonly knownsubcomponent, the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB), is the foundation fromwhich a repository of knowledge about the usage of IT is constructed. A CMDB is a crucialinstrument for responding to the aforementioned pressures. To fully understand and appreciatethe role of the CMS and its CMDB, we have to start with understanding the overarching goalsof ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

ITIL emphasizes that the management of IT is the management of the business services thatare supplied by IT. ITIL defines a number of systems, processes, and disciplines for managingIT business services. The purpose of the CMS is to provide a central control on the config -uration of the IT infrastructure. This control functions in IT just as a building blueprint servesan engineer. An engineer continually consults the blueprint going through the processes ofproducing, modifying, and rebuilding. IT engineers use the CMS in the same way. When abuilding has no blueprint, the engineers are lost, tracing plumbing lines and guessing what ishidden behind walls in order to do their work. When IT lacks a CMS, IT engineers are equallylost. The CMDB helps by acting as a source of information to manage and track the various


resources of the IT enterprise. It further provides context for those resources by tracking therelationships between resources to understand the interdependencies between them. Forexample, using the CMDB, management can see what makes up the infrastructure of a specificservice such as the supporting processes, hardware, software, and so on. This kind of visibilityis critical, as more than ever, IT environments have become heterogeneous in nature.

The principal unit of infrastructure contained within the CMDB’s data is referred to as aConfiguration Item (CI). CIs are the heart of the CMS. Through the CMDB, information aboutthe CI’s attributes and relationships to other CIs is tracked. But more than that, the CI is a termthat ITIL uses to designate any part of the IT ecosystem, including a wide range of objects, bothphysical and logical. For example, hardware devices such as storage units, and businessservices such as email, are both CIs. CIs are essentially classified into meaningful objects.

The CMDB plays a critical role in both defining and executing strategy by helping managementprovide an environment that is supportive to those structural forces that beneficially impacttime, economy, and profitability. At minimum it assists in simplifying the management andcoordination of resources from a business perspective in seven fundamental ways. Table Cintroduces the seven fundamental CMDB use cases and shows how they impact each of theIT value dimensions.

TABLE C — THE SEVEN FUNDAMENTAL CMDB USE CASES

Impact Analysis

Root CauseDetermination

ChangeGovernance

Auditing andCompliance

ResourceOptimization

Services Mapping

ServicePerformancePlanning

DEFINITION

Determinepotential faultissues proactively

Identify underlyingissues causingfaults

Provideenforcement formanagementpolicies

Validate operationsare conductedproperly

Profile untilizationand economies ofpurpose

Build and trackservice assemblymodels

Provide logicalblueprinting forservice deployment

TIME

Improvedproductivity

Reduced time torecovery

Stakeholderapproval

Regulatoryenforcement

Asset utilization

Identifieddependencies

Improved serviceadoption

ECONOMY

Resourcecoordination

Resource planning

ReducedBureaucracy

Managementvisibility

Economy of scale

Service traceability

SLA compliance

PROFITABILITY

Avoid costs

Cost reduction

Cost reduction

Revenueprotection

Revenueprotection

Increase revenue

Increase revenue


SECTION 2

The Seven Fundamental Use Cases for a CMDBImpact AnalysisA key to sustaining a viable business is to make sure those resources that encourage economicagility are working and vigorously exploiting market opportunities through sustaining, growing,and changing as required.

The livelihood of all businesses stands upon the definition, design, deployment, and delivery ofservices. Services are the lifeblood of business sustainability. Running the business is aboutensuring that products and services can be delivered to clients on time and with the expectedlevel of quality and acceptable cost. If a service fails to meets any of these expected objectives,an event is triggered and an incident is acknowledged.

Formally, in concept, an incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of anIT service. In practice, support records, called incidents, are created whenever anything goeswrong in IT. Incidents are often created automatically when some monitor or indicator detectsan abnormal situation. More often than not, the impact of an incident is not immediately clear.From an operational view, when an incident occurs, the first critical responsibility is to determineits impact on business services. Understanding the nature of the incident does not directlycommunicate its potential impacts on the business. Incidents come in all sizes and take onmany forms; small incidents can have catastrophic downstream impacts, and large incidents,on the other hand, can be limited to only a localized disruption.

The CMDB plays a critical role in understanding the possible impacts of an incident by relatingthe identified affected resources (CIs) with the business services that they support. To bemeaningful to the business, impact is always measured in terms of its positive or negativeeffect on IT business services. Consider one CI, an enormous multi-terabyte storage unit.This is certainly a large and expensive piece of equipment, and a failure (an event) will haveconsequences. However, if this large storage device is off the active service line, its impact onbusiness services will be minimal. The kind of information typically stored in a CMDB allowsresponsible technicians to determine if the storage unit device is actually supporting a service.They have to understand the configuration of the business services that the unit might support.

What separates a CMDB from other kinds of databases is that the CMDB is uniquely designedto store and understand relationships between CIs. As a device and a business service maythemselves both be defined CIs, a CMDB would store relationships between business servicesand the devices that support them. A CMDB can display the relationships between the storageunit and business services such that the risk of a failure of the unit impacting a given businessservice can easily be seen. When the storage unit shuts down in the middle of the night, thisready display of the relationship is the difference between an all hands emergency and a minorevent that can be deferred to the morning’s day shift.


Root Cause IdentificationOnce the impact of an event has been identified, the priority for attending to it is directed, andit becomes important to identify its root cause. By reviewing the CI relationships in the CMDBand following its chain of connections (interdependencies), the entities, or CIs that generatedthe event, are generally identified with a reasonable degree of certainty. This certainly, ofcourse, is dependent on how robust the CMDB is, meaning the amount and integrity of thedata it maintains.

Let’s consider another example: In many enterprises, employees are empowered to order theirown supplies through a self-service procurement interface. This often results in savings inresources (time, expense, etc.) that can be redirected toward other, more productive pursuits.However, these savings also bring new vulnerabilities.

Self-service procurement is typically a complex application with many moving parts. Email,workflow, purchase order handling, accounts payable, and shipping all play a role. Althoughautomated systems are usually faster and require fewer resources than equivalent manualsystems, they also tend to be less resilient because manual systems tend to be self-correcting.When an order for supplies is late, the person who ordered them asks the person who took theorder what happened. This person usually knows something about their part of the orderingsystem and will either fix the problem or pass it on to someone who can.

Automated systems are somewhat different. Tracing the cause of a slow order is not so easy.There is after all, no person to ask. Instead, the user has to register an incident at the servicedesk. The service desk analyst or technician has to determine the cause of the slow order andto identify the correct remedial action. Through proper design and deployment, the CMDBdisplays the relationships between the procurement service, the subservices, and the physicalsystem components and graphically depicts the CIs that procurement depends upon. Theseprovider CIs are all potential root causes for the slow order. Armed with this information, theanalyst can determine if the cause of the slow order stems from a CI that is functioning belowits agreed upon operational level and take the proper remedial steps.

Root cause determination is even more important when a problem is identified. Assume the ITsupport desk has experienced a series of delayed order incidents. The goal of incidentmanagement is to restore the interrupted service. The goal of problem management is toidentify and solve problems. Although the two overlap and are even sometimes hard todistinguish, they are distinct. For incident management, root cause determination is an aid tochoosing the correct remedial action, but not a necessity. For example, you can speed up anorder by placing it manually with a supplier without knowing why the order was slow. But,problem management almost always deals in root causes. Fixing a problem by replacing anentire system is a rare event. Most often, problem managers carefully determine root causesand then deliver pinpoint solutions that solve closely circumscribed problems.

Once the cause is found, a quick response to correct the problem is in order. It’s this constantprocess of issue detection, analysis, and correction that gradually eliminates many of theperpetual issues facing the IT organization. It is this continual improvement cycle that remainsa persistent force to positively influence the way things work. Adaptation is paramount. Notsurprisingly, the design of the CMDB can provide for both a reactive and proactive approach toroot cause analysis. This exemplifies how IT influences a business model, not just follows it.


Achieving the ability to handle impact analysis and root cause identification goes a long wayto maintaining the viability of IT to support the business, and therefore the viability of thebusiness itself. However, any true operational process needs to be able to step back and seewhether the overall process is achieving its goals, and achieving them according to the policiesand procedures that have been put in place. In a sense, the CA CMDB, when staged properly,becomes a mountain of evidence to see whether IT is organizationally and purposefullysupporting the business.

Change GovernanceIn the previous two sections we discussed impact analysis and root cause identification asefforts to resolve service issues, making them two critical enablers of sustainable operations.According to ITIL, another key to sustainability is the change management process. In ITIL,change management is defined as follows:

• The goal of the Change Management process is to ensure that standardized methods andprocedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimizethe impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve theday-to-day operations of the organization.

The reality is that change management goes beyond this definition. Change managementultimately is the key discipline that companies must have to adapt to changes in themarketplace, whether they are the expected benefits, the delivery channel, the manufacturingprocess, or regulatory. Agility is the key to viability, and change management is the supportprocess that promotes agility.

IT has a fundamentally strategic role with regards to the business when it comes to changemanagement. Although on the surface, changes in organization structure, responsibilities, andso on are rarely considered explicitly when making a technology change. The resulting changesin information flow often require that a change in responsibility, whether technical ororganizational, be made explicit. The less explicitly addressed the expected changes are, themore likely unplanned work will develop. Unplanned work, at any level, is what causesorganizations to fail under their own weight. Time spent pursuing opportunities is what growsthe business and focuses transitions in a positive direction. Effort related to unplanned changesdistracts the business and diminishes the economic viability of an organization.

Since changes are a fundamentally important part of the marketplace, improving changemanagement is a key to success in sustaining the business. The way to improve changemanagement is to institute a Change Governance process. This is where the roles of both theCMS and CMDB enable IT to play a crucial and effective role in gaining overall agility.

ITIL defines a specific set of activities to perform when managing a change. These include:creating a formal Request for Change (RFC), reviewing the request for possible negativeimpacts, approving the change, verifying that the change happened (or that it was successfullybacked out), and finally, identifying what should be improved to make changes more effectiveor efficient going forward.


The CMDB plays a role in each of these activities. As part of the aforementioned serviceimpact analysis, the CMDB allows the impact to be described in business terms. The CMDBplays a crucial role in building out the RFC by identifying not only what needs to change butalso what supporting elements are in need of changing to achieve a positive result. It alsosupports the efforts of the Change Advisory Board (CAB), whose members are responsible foroverseeing all changes from a management perspective. The CMDB supports a better approvalprocess because specific stakeholders in a change will be identified. These stakeholders maynot have been identified if the change was viewed only in terms of the directly changed object.This more rounded, holistic approach to change ensures that responsibility is taken for thechange, helping it to be successful.

The CMDB also has two additional features that are invaluable:

First, the CMDB maintains a critical distinction between the concept of a planned state, anowned or authorized state, and a discovered or audited state. This allows an importantflexibility in IT because the intended state of the CI can be managed as an approved state(standard), while the actual existing CI (variable) is managed as an authorized state, respectfulof the approved but pragmatically handled per current necessities. The CMDB further allowsthe ability to track against an audit or historical state. This tuple — planned, authorized,audited — is a key to ensuring that the change process is working. Proactively, it ensures thatwhat is planned is what is implemented; reactively, it ensures that what was deployed is whatwas planned. IT builds integrity into the system. It encourages accountability, which is the endresult of a change governance process.

Second, the CMDB uses the concept of versioning. This allows the CMDB to track the historicalstates of a CI over time. The CMDB supports the continuous service improvement process bymaking visible what is working and what is not. To determine recommendations forimprovements to CIs, the various states of CIs can be compared to see what changes wererecorded as part of their evolution.

As changes to the business require changes to the technology, the change process itself mustadapt. If there are gaps in the change process, or if some change plans are working better thanothers, the CMDB makes the need for change process improvement visible.

Auditing and ComplianceFor many years, the domain of IT fell into areas where automation could be easily handledthrough routine processes. This included areas like finance and manufacturing. The additionalfact that many of these systems, where based on mainframe, made the effort to ensure theywere working much easier. There were limited databases and limited places where data entryand reports were generated. There was limited integration between systems. In a sense, thisone–to-one or siloed relationship between the process and its underlying IT meant thatauditing the processes was synonymous with IT Auditing or making sure that the supportingIT systems were working.


Today, however, modern sourcing models like shared services, pooled infrastructure,outsourcing, virtual servers and others have made such a one-to-one relationship of process-to-system comparatively uneconomical. Additionally, the open environment that characterizesIT requires auditing from several different perspectives including process, security,performance, and management. To that end, the Information Systems Audit and ControlAssociation (ISACA) and the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) drafted a set of best practicesknown as the Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (CobiT). CobiTprovides managers, auditors, and IT users with a set of defined processes and measures toassist an IT organization with maximizing the benefits of IT through the development of bothIT Governance practices and supporting control objectives.

CobiT covers four domains:

• Plan and Organize This covers the use of information technology and how it can beleveraged to meet corporate goals and objectives.

• Acquire and Implement This covers the identification of IT requirements, the provisioning oftechnology, and deploying it in a manner that supports the services of the business

• Delivery and Support This focuses on the execution, training, and security of applicationsand supporting technology within the IT environment.

• Monitor and Evaluate This deals with assessing whether technology is meeting the needs ofthe organization and of any regulatory bodies under which the company falls.

These domains are quite broad and CobiT goes through a great deal of effort to break thesedown into specific control objectives with measurements and other tools. It is here that boththe CMS and the CMDB play a key supporting role.

In the ITIL literature, the specification of what is tracked in the CMDB is largely left to thepractitioner. While guidance is provided, it soon becomes apparent that the practical way tobuild a CMDB is to decide which IT management decisions and practices need to be supporteddecided what processes will provide or consume the information targeted for decision support.The CMDB plays a large role in the way its data covers the aforementioned CobiT domains.

From a Plan and Organize perspective, there are three key aspects. The CMDB contains thelogical architecture of the IT environment. Decisions about planning and organizing require thespecific ability to see how things are related and how things will be impacted by changes madeto the plan. Putting in a server farm, for example, may provoke radical change in the need forcentralized bandwidth (resources) and updates to the operating systems and databasessupporting high availability. In addition, the ability to manage the relationships between ITprocesses and organizations (service levels) is a key aspect of this control objective. Finally,being able to assess and manage IT risks is paramount to successful planning and organizing;the CMDB’s record of CI relationships play an ideal role to satisfy this requirement (risks).


From an Acquire and Implement perspective, the CMDB maintains information about the varioushardware, sources, and other resources available in the IT environment. The ability to trackconfiguration states through versioning supports the ability to manage changes. Through theuse of the CMDB, release units and specific tasks can be identified to ensure that the change iseither satisfied or is rolled back to its correct prechange configuration. Limiting unplanned workis the key to this control objective and the CMDB is unparalleled in its ability to help managesafe implementations.

From a Delivery and Support perspective, the CMDB provides CI attributes and CI relationshipsthat assist the Service Desk with managing incidents, problems, and changes through rootcause analysis and change impact analysis. It aids in both IT and Business service continuity byidentifying possible weaknesses. It helps to manage services levels at the business, user, andprovider levels. Most importantly, it manages the configuration of not only the CI, but thecollection of CIs that reflects the entire IT delivery platform. It provides context to what is beingdelivered and how it should be supported.

Finally, from a Monitor and Evaluate perspective, the CMDB helps by providing the ability tounderstand how services are constructed and to monitor the individual components and thecollection simultaneously. This allows a holistic top-down and bottom-up approach to ITmanagement. By tracking the changes and configuration states of CI through time, the CMDBsupports proper auditing and regulatory compliance. By supporting a change process, with itsspecific policies around CI changes, it provides the means of IT Governance.

Clearly, through supporting these four perspectives, the CMDB acts as a catalyst to thebusiness. It supports the Change and Governance processes that allow management toproperly stage and control the activities of the IT organization in parallel with the otherstrategic activities of the firm.

Resource OptimizationUp to this point we have discussed four major uses for the CMDB. These reflected the typicaluse of a CMDB when an organization is in the process of first implementing a CMDB andfocusing on developing best practices around ITIL Service Support.

As the CMDB becomes enriched with more CIs or more CI types, several additional benefitsbecome available. The first of these is resource optimization. Resource optimization covers awide field. Often, resource optimization is carried out through Asset Management. Thisincludes software license management and inventory management. Resource optimization isalso covered by HRMS and Project Management. While each area has a particular strength inmanaging a certain type of resource, the CMDB can play a supporting role for each of theseareas. But, what makes the CMDB distinctive is not so much its help in optimizing any specifictype or volume of CIs, but rather its focus on the collection of CIs that are assembled to deliverspecific functionality as a service. Unlike other point management systems, the CMDB providesthe ability to consolidate resources per the context of their usage and support for services.


A common example is when a firm is looking to potentially optimize servers, either throughthe use of some form of physical consolidation, server clustering, or server virtualization. Toproperly stage this optimization, it is essential to understand the underlying relationships thatexist between the physical technologies and the business services that they support. Assumeyou had several servers located in three data centers throughout North America (New York,Chicago, and Los Angeles). The new plan is to consolidate these services to New York. Theplan would require understanding, per the current CMDB, what existing relationships exist andwhat the CMDB would show those relationships to be like in a future state. In performing a gapanalysis (of current versus future), it will be clear that many changes will need to be assessedand justified. In many instances these probable changes would have been invisible had aCMDB been unavailable.

The CMDB would have a critical role in making visible which CI relationships are redundant.It would be much easier to determine why specific CIs are candidates to be consolidated,whether as a host or client. The CMDB would also provide improved capability to determinethe level of work required to make the transition possible.

Moreover, the CMDB allows the economic benefits of consolidation to be more likely realized.It provides transparency into duplication of efforts, duplication of assignments, and duplicationof structural entities. It reduces the risks of unforeseen expenditures due to lack of perspective(insight and planning) from a systems view.

Further, the CMDB would help in optimizing resources by providing the means to plan andvalidate that the configuration of specific CIs, or relationships between CIs, follow a specificbaseline or reference model. The CMDB becomes a tactical tool to enforce standardizationpolicies for optimizing the use of resources both at an individual level and as a group. Thisessentially drives economies of scale across multiple IT management processes.

Through its impact on the adoption of best practices, it also provides the ability to buildcontextually proactive resource optimization into the infrastructure, not just after the factrealignments. By supporting the separation of a CI definition into three areas — planned,authorized, and actual — and providing for the means to track baselines, the CMDB goesbeyond simple linear planning models, and supports more dynamic what-if multitier levels. Itreduces the risk of a reactive resource optimization process by staging a proactive one.

From a business perspective, resource optimization helps to keep the business running byimproving the economy of service delivery. It also helps to grow the business by easing theburden of and quickly adopting to changes that the market requires through the use ofstandardization. Finally, resource optimization helps transform the business by providing fulltraceability to those resources that are critical for transitioning from one model to another.

Services MappingOne of the truly unique opportunities that a CMDB provides to the business and IT communityis the ability to track intangible assets as configuration items. The pinnacle of this capability isthe representation of an IT or business service as a CI.


Imagine having the power to consistently communicate the definition of a service acrossvarious business and IT departments. Also, imagine obtaining the ability to coordinate supportefforts by having a consistent understanding of what services are being provided regardless ofwhere an action is being taken in an organization. The power of having a service as a CI allowsmanagement to be able to embrace a 360-degree view of service, whether in operations,finance, fulfillment, support, or regulatory.

Outside of siloed, unstructured efforts that are generally limited to a spreadsheet, the CMDB isthe first orchestrated approach to build support tracking of such logical entities in a deliberatemanner, and it is one that follows and enables service management best practices. Defining aservice in the CMDB begins with building a Service Model, which is a way of representing whatconstitutes a service. This model can vary from one business to another but often includes andrelates objects such as: applications, infrastructure (hardware/software), databases, documents(policies, procedures), service level agreements, and other key resources, like people.

This transition from physical assets as CIs to intangible assets as CIs provides the ability tologically reflect exactly how IT becomes an ecosystem that supports the business. Once theService Model has been built, it can be recorded in the CMDB as sets of related CIs. Thisprovides the basis for the 360-degree management view. It provides the ability to initiateimpact analysis and root cause identification at the level of a service, which is the level mostimmediately evident to the business.

As business models rely on services, the CMDB connection to supporting a business model isclear. By having a Service represented globally as a CI in the CMDB, the time to effectivelycommunicate key challenges is reduced because people are seeing the same picture even ifthey are looking through different lenses (roles). It improves profitability by improving theability of IT to understand and protect against the impact of failures to the business. It improveseconomy by providing much better decision making and execution coordination across theorganization. The CMDB literally becomes a pragmatic tool to align IT with the business.

Services Performance PlanningThe last of the fundamental CMDB use cases is about performance planning for the imple -mentation of services. Similar in nature to Resource Optimization, Services PerformancePlanning is open-ended. There are many way in which an IT organization prepares for performance.ITIL version 2 itself leverages a set of management processes collectively known as ServiceDelivery to specifically handle this task. In ITIL version 3, Service Design is assigned thisresponsibility. However, Service Performance Planning includes both hard and soft infrastructure;it is important to understand that. The understanding is available from a CMDB perspective.

From the infrastructure side, the CMDB provides the ability to understand what relationshipswill need to exist for the service to achieve its anticipated quality goals. Whether these goalsare spelled out in a service level agreement (SLA) or not, it becomes clear that part ofperformance planning is to understand what relationships are key. This is often driven andrecorded by the Service Model discussed above. In addition, the CMDB helps to identify whatcascading effects may need to be reviewed as part of the planning. The CMDB encourages aholistic approach to planning instead of a single point of view. Additionally, Services PerformancePlanning encourages the management of a service throughout its lifecycle by understandingnot only the immediate impacts of the service, but by how its supporting infrastructure (orrelated CIs) is impacted.


On the softer, organizationally-focused side, the CMDB helps determine those activities thatneed to be completed to ensure acceptance of the new service. This includes understandingwhat stakeholders are impacted and how, and how risks to and from changes can be managedwithin an acceptable tolerance level. The CMDB encourages partnerships that are consistentwith the philosophy of developing a 360-degree view. Effectively, transition planning becomesmore organized, with less chance of risk due to unplanned circumstances.

From the standpoint of supporting the business, Services Performance Planning may be the topuse case for deploying a CMDB. Businesses ultimately thrive based on their ability to capturenew market opportunities. Often these opportunities present themselves as services. IT’sability to quickly implement services becomes a key time-to-market advantage. It also supportskeeping the business running by ensuring that the appropriate quality level is designed intoboth the service and its supporting environment.

Service Performance Planning also encourages the adoption of new services by removing therisks inherent in making changes. The impact of changes is reflected on people, process, andtechnology. The ability to anticipate the impact on the organization from any level is bestaddressed by setting expectations. Using the CMDB as one key data source, these expect -ations can be set by having accurate data on which to base decisions and recommendations.

SECTION 3

Tying the Fundamental Use Cases TogetherIt is important to understand that these seven fundamental use cases are just that —fundamental. They do not reflect only those things that can or should be done, but ratherrepresent those things that a CMDB, and therefore a CMS, must implement to properlysupport IT and its alignment with the business. Supporting these use cases will happen overtime, however, and it should not be expected that all seven use cases can be deployed at once.

It should also be understood that these seven use cases were selected because of how theywork both individually and collectively to build an overall support structure, as illustrated inFigure A.


HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF CMDB FUNDAMENTAL USE CASES

REVIEWING USE CASE 1 — IMPACT ANALYSIS Impacts are a major aspect of the customerexperience of the service. When they cause the service to not meet expectations, the risk oftheir occurrence must eventually be designed out of the delivery. As shown in Figure A, thecorresponding resolution of these impacts amounts to decisions about what tolerance will bemaintained for each. Also, these resolutions must be recorded.

REVIEWING USE CASE 2 — ROOT CAUSE IDENTIFICATION The root cause of incidents andproblems become causes due to their position amongst interdependencies of CIs within theservice. To efficiently discover root causes, the interdependencies must be traceable ondemand. By definition, the work of preserving and recovering approved interdependenciesbecomes the thrust of infrastructure maintenance.

REVIEWING USE CASE 3 — CHANGE GOVERNANCE Because maintenance takes the lead insustaining quality, the complexity and scope of maintenance activity takes a top-tier priority inoperations. The strongest example of this is in proactive and reactive change, where quality isexplicitly managed within the maintenance methods.

REVIEWING USE CASE 4 — AUDITING AND GOVERNANCE The business relevance of qualityattributes established in the infrastructure is defined by standards that set the terms forbusiness validation, or auditing, of the alignment of the infrastructure to the business needs.

REVIEWING USE CASE 5 — RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION Auditing and other validations reveal thecorrelation of how things are to how they worked. Those discoveries establish the relativeimportance of keeping the current organization or structures offered by IT for business support,or of reorganizing them. Therefore, optimizing the infrastructure’s existing relationships ofconfigurations is a key responsibility of service provision managers.

FIGURE A

The Fundamental Use Cases aredesigned to work in unision to supportthe business sevices lifecycle processfrom an IT perspective.


REVIEWING USE CASE 6 — SERVICES MAPPING The configurations and relationships that areactually in service and in effect are the real operational environment, but they cannot beaccountable to operational outcomes without an explicit reference to their intended andauthorized state. For that reason, managers must design purposeful models of intendedconfigurations and map (record) them as the reference vocabulary for follow-on accountability

REVIEWING USE CASE 7 — SERVICES PERFORMANCE PLACING The business value of theconfiguration models is established by proactively planning their alignment to expectedbusiness requirements, including the requirements for flexibility and adaptability tomodifications of business requirements. By showing when and why particular models arepertinent to business, planning links IT architecture to business strategy.

SECTION 4

ConclusionsIn conclusion, it is through the CMDB that the CMS helps business success in several ways.We discussed three of these: time utilization, profitability, and economy. Together throughproper management, these help avoid extinction of a business. They encourage IT financialmanagement and overall cash flow, keep the well flush with reserves. These three factors inturn directly promote an agile approach to the business by supporting one or more keybusiness strategies, whether it be better products, customer intimacy, or cost efficiency.Further, the CMDB provides the background and coordinating information that allow all criticalIT and most business processes to not only succeed, but become part of constructing anoverarching approach to building a sustainable competitive advantage. The CMDB is certainlydown in the trenches, but within its structure is a firm foundation from which to build.

SECTION 5

About the AuthorsDavid A. Messineo is an ITSM practitioner with more than 20 years experience developing anddeploying enterprise-level software solutions focused on IT management. He is currently aPractice Director at CA, where he focuses on establishing best practices for consistentlydelivering large scale implementations. David holds both an ITIL Service Manager and eSCMcertification.

Malcolm Ryder is an ITSM practitioner with more than 20 years experience designingenterprise IT management software solutions and delivering solutions to individual companiesand to the US and UK marketplace. He is currently a solutions architect at CA, where heconsultatively establishes requirements and blueprints for integrated ITSM implementationsworking directly with customers.

CA (NASDAQ: CA), one of the world’s leading independent,enterprise management software companies, unifies andsimplifies complex information technology (IT) managementacross the enterprise for greater business results. With ourEnterprise IT Management vision, solutions and expertise,we help customers effectively govern, manage and secure IT.

MP333081108

Documents

Why CMDB - 7 Fundamental Use Cases