How to Populate the Business Unit on Configuration Items

[SN Arch Guy]

Is there an OOB method to populate the Business Unit field on configurations items?

Can discovery do this? It seems like this might be impractical unless the IP ranges were different, which might not be the case.

Can Technical Service Offerings or Business Service Offerings do this, just like they populate other fields? It seems like this would be the way to go, but I haven't found any official documentation or post that describes this.

Or maybe populate it via Service Mapping?

If there is no OOB method, does anyone have a tried and true approach?

[scott_lemm]

A little history here...

Historically, the CMDB had organizational attributes for Company and Department. There was no Business Unit attribute. When Companies wanted to identify ownership of Assets/CIs, they could not utilize any Organizational structure between Company (legal entities) and Departments. When APM was introduced, they added an attribute on Business Application for "Business Unit". This capability was well received. Additionally, other SN Products began using Business Units thus making them more valuable objects in the platform. As we worked on normalizing the CMDB, we agreed that BU is an important part of the Organizational hierarchy and its reference should move to the core/base cmdb_ci. Thus its creation was in support of identifying the appropriate Organizational structure for ownership. 

In adding the Business Unit attribute at cmdb_ci, we made it an equal citizen to the existing Company and Department. That said, and like Company & Department, we did not add any automated population methods. 

Can it be automated, yes. Should it be automated... that's another question. Depending on your ownership policies, you could look to utilize the BU on TSO and synchronize that value to all of its managed CIs.

At this time we do not have OOB automation methods for BU other than setting a default value for all CIs.

Hope this helps,

Scott

[SN Arch Guy · Accepted solution]

Thank you Scott, this is helpful. I believe TSOs can automatically populate attributes like Managed by group and Support group. Do BSOs offer similar auto-population methods? Can other fields (like Business Unit) be added to the TSOs or BSOs to auto-populate the contained CIs, or would this need to be done with a BR? Not sure yet that this would be the best method, because identifying the criteria to associate the TSO/BSO to a BU still needs thought. Also thinking it might be done as you suggest with BAs or even App Services.

You might include some of the history and recommendations in the next CSDM white paper.

[Barry Kant]

Technically speaking yes you can enrich the logic of the TSO Sync logic, however the BU doesn't belong in this domain in CSDM. The natural place of the BU is the Business Application if it comes to ownership if the Application as a total. 
If it comes to consumption then you could also use Subscriptions on Business Service Offerings. BU can be seen as top level departments in a way. But then it is more about invoicing based on consumption. 
Note:
A CI can support multiple Application Services and therefore multiple Business Service Offerings. Even multiple Business Applications. Potentially that can lead to multiple BU references. For that reason I still think a lookup option is the easiest.