Learn how Fiat Chrysler Automobiles increased its CMDB data accuracy by 80%. Sign up for session BRE0375 at Knowledge 19 to meet the Fiat Chrysler team.

[Matt Gowarty]

We all get better when we learn from each other. That’s why I’m really looking forward to going to Knowledge 19 – it’s a great opportunity to share our experiences and to keep up to date with the latest ServiceNow capabilities. I’m James Kailukaitis from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, and I’m excited to be presenting at Knowledge this year. Along with my co-presenter, Ritesh Shah, I’ll be talking about how Fiat Chrysler has dramatically improved the accuracy of its CMDB by leveraging out-of-the-box ServiceNow capabilities.

Like most people, you probably recognize Fiat Chrysler as a large manufacturer of cars and light commercial vehicles. As you might imagine, we have an IT landscape that matches our company’s scale. Our IT team supports a workforce of more than 262,000 people and manages over 5.700 business applications running on more than 20,000 servers. When you’re dealing with a large environment like this, it’s really important to track all of the components – whether you’re trying to fix a service issue or make a change, you need a reliable view of your business services and infrastructure to do things accurately and efficiently.

Multiple third-party tools created CMDB chaos

That’s why we put so much emphasis on our CMDB. However, as we’ll describe in our session, we were struggling to populate our CMDB using external vendor inventory and other tools. It was basically “garbage in, garbage out” – redundant CIs and an inconsistent taxonomy were just some of the problems these tools created. Among other things, this resulted in a massive drain on IT productivity as we were led into mazes and down blind alleys by unreliable configuration information.

By using ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping, we increased data accuracy and IT productivity

After these initial attempts, we decided to take a different route – leveraging ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box capabilities rather than wrestling with third-party tools. In our session, we’ll talk about how we leveraged ServiceNow’s automated Discovery and Service Mapping – along with other CMDB capabilities such as reconciliation and normalization – to increase the accuracy of our CMDB by more than 80%. We’ll take you through our entire journey, sharing our challenges and practical examples of how we overcame them. Will also talk about the benefits we’ve seen, not the least of which is a 35% to 40% increase in IT productivity.

Interested? Come see us at Knowledge 19 to find out more

If you’re struggling with poor CMDB data quality, I really hope you’re going to get a lot of value out of this session. To find it, search for session BRE0375 or for the title, “Accelerate your IT modernization with CMDB and Discovery.” I’m looking forward to meeting you there!