Defining CI Ownership

[adamthompso]

Good day all,

I've had a good browse and while there are some good articles/posts on CI ownership, I can't find anything to help on the scale of the company I work at.

I'm part of the CMDB team in a large global organisation. We currently have just over 3m CIs and are 18 months into our ServiceNow journey.

In our organisation, CI ownership in our previous tool was determined by what "service instance" used the CI (ignoring shared infrastructure), obviously that didn't help with orphaned CIs but it worked for the vast majority of the estate because reporting was done outside of tool and the tool didn't have much in the way of automations around CIs.

However, in ServiceNow we want to take advantage of things like CMDB Health tasks being generated and assigned to a CIs "owner" (managed by group) which means we need to assign ownership to the actual CIs themselves to do this OOTB. The problem is, trying to derive ownership from service instances in tool is becoming very complex the more we investigate trying to do so. A one off script to seek ownership would be fine but it's the ongoing updates that will cause problems, for example if a Service Instance has 100CIs associated with it and we update a group then there is going to be a delay in saving said Service Instance while the tool tries to filter down, if CIs move between Service Instances then there is another trigger there to go seek ownership, so on and so on, it just becomes very resource heavy.

It also wouldn't be difficult for ownership to end up out of sync.

Before my actual question and just to add a bit of context, while we do have some on-prem infrastructure, there is a general "Cloud First Strategy" within the organisation so more and more is being moved to the cloud meaning we have quite a large cloud footprint (mostly AWS but some Azure/Oracle also).

Also for awareness, we don't have a single "Cloud Team" or a single "Server Team", teams are split into different business units.

Question

How do people in similar size organisations manage/assign CI ownership?

Other ideas we have had

The main ideas we have had are all based on cloud:

1. Dynamic CI Group that picks up CIs associated with a specific Cloud Service Account, attached to a TSO.
   1. The problem with this is that we haven't yet designed how TSOs will fit into our organisation as a whole so creating a bunch (we have around 450 Cloud Service Accounts) for this purpose feels premature as it could conflict with a larger TSO design when that comes.
2. An additional tag on cloud resources which is aligned with an assignment group in ServiceNow
   1. I think this is our preferred option but it's difficult to sell because it comes with a large retagging request to all cloud teams.
   2. Additionally, this doesn't help with on-prem infrastructure

Appreciate any and all help with this.