Economic downturns are a challenging time for any organization. To navigate these challenging times, organizations often look into their data like a crystal ball to help cut costs, maintain stability, and find ways to recuperate existing spend. The CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is a vital database for enterprise architecture, service operations, and asset management teams to help accomplish this task.
- With accurate and up-to-date configuration data, Service Operations teams quickly identify affected services, resolve issues, and make informed decisions about system updates, upgrades, or migrations.
- Asset management teams look to decrease the costs of software usage. The CMDB may contain duplicate CIs that have installed software. The Software Asset Management application uses installed software data stored within the CMDB to track software license costs. When duplicate CIs exist, then software costs are duplicated.
- Management develops strategies to manage technology lifecycle, software obsolescence, and technical debt using the data consumed from the CMDB through the common data model relationships and visualization through ServiceNow's Strategic Portfolio Management. This information can help organizations identify areas of potential divestment and cost savings.
Achieve CMDB Health by considering these three pillars:
1. Ingestion - Auto-populate your CMDB where possible. The CMDBs of today are not the CMDBs of the past. Given the volume of CIs and rate of change, it is not humanly possible to manually track the rapid inflation and deflation of virtualized cloud resources, hybrid, and on-premises data centers, with applications and code to maintain the relationships to the Services you provide. Automate ingestion with these ServiceNow applications:
- Discovery
- Service Mapping
- Agent Client Collector
- Service Graph Connectors
2. Insight – Establish processes to analyze and use data for operations support & planning. These tools leverage the CMDB data and provide value when operationalized in Service Operations activity. Insight is readily available out-of-box with the following applications:
- CMDB Workspace
- Query Builder
- Service Graph Data Visualizer
- CMDB Search using Natural Language Processing (NLQ)
- CMDB 360 for managing multiple sources of ingested data.
In addition, using the Common Service Data Model also ensures that applications in the platform use the same data tables. CSDM ensures that reports and insight speak the same language.
3. Governance and Health –Proactively track the quality and accuracy of your data. While the technology vastly improves your CMDB Data, the organization needs people and processes to ensure success. All data, not just CMDB data within an organization, requires data governance. Knowing who uses the data and how support teams and reporting use the data is important to understand. Data management and governance require leadership support and crowdsourcing from the broader support organization. Data management processes ensure that the CMDB is trustworthy, accurate, and well-maintained. Set up a governance committee to meet regularly and focus on policy creation, process oversight, and accountability for data integrity through reporting. This governance committee should include the Configuration Manager. The Configuration Manager and team of CI analysts should follow processes that include checking health reports, setting up lifecycle management, data auditing, and verification processes. ServiceNow provides tools and technology to execute these activities:
- CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations dashboards that contain +35 health scan definitions.
- CMDB Health dashboard to ensure completeness, correctness, and compliance
- Data Manager to delete, archive, retire, and attest CI data.
- Data Certification provides a scheduled audit and verification process
To summarize now is the time to strengthen the 3 pillars needed to have a strong CMDB data foundation in the ServiceNow platform. My next article discusses the "5 Steps to Monitor CMDB Health Proactively."
These leading practices improve end-to-end visibility, cut cost, achieve higher value, and say YES! to increased efficiencies.
Resources and Links:
CMDB Governance
CMDB Workshop
CSDM Overview
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