CMDB Population

[cjmtlc123]

Good afternoon everyone,

I have a few questions about dealing with a CMDB. My first questions are:

When do you populate the CMDB? If I am creating a new application, system, or project, at what point do I populate the CMDB with the CI information? Do I do it after I install or implement the project, application, or system? Do I capture the effort in a change request in ServiceNow?

My second question is:

As a configuration manager, should I be responsible for updating the CMDB or should a ServiceNow administrator do it?

I'd really like some opinions on the matter. Thank you in advance. I look forward to hearing from you.

[CMDB Whisperer]

As a configuration manager you should not be responsible for creating and updating the CIs.  This falls to the responsibility of the data owners, which are typically associated with classes of CIs, or with individual services.  Populating the CMDB with applications and infrastructure and technical information about their configuration is ideally the responsibility of trusted data sources and discovery tools which are integrated into your CMDB, and as a result of hardware asset management processes.  These two methods will result in the CIs being recorded earlier in the lifecycle, which is ideally what you want.  When you deploy the service assets and operationalize them for CI services, this is then just a change in their state and configuration, which should be done under the control of Change Management for governance purposes.  This gives you the visibility into operationalization of CIs, which is an important thing to have visibility into and control of!

[cjmtlc3D]

This is great information! Thank you!

[Ashok Sasidhara]

@CMDB Whisperer Great suggestions. 

@cjmtlc123 Another important aspect to be considered is to ensure that the scope of CMDB data population is defined clearly based on the organization's business objectives. i.e. Only the CI classes and attributes which the organization needs based on their objectives and which they are ready to manage on an ongoing basis should be populated in the CMDB. Also the key details like the CI Classes, attributes, methods used to populate each class, data owners of each class etc. should be clearly documented and this document should be kept updated on an ongoing basis.

[CMDB Whisperer]

@Ashok Sasidhara spoken like a true configuration manager!  Amen!