"Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers." This advice about a journey comes from the late George Carlin-- a comedian.
We have advice for those of you on an ITIL or ITSM journey heading towards or already deep into a CMDB implementation — or some of you who never even plan to implement a CMDB.
There is no need to wait for the final destination to realize the benefits of service modeling and dependency mapping, which is true wherever you are in your journey.
This way — independent of your project maturity — you are able to realize the many benefits derived from dependency mapping and service models, which include:
- Ability to see overall service health from the user perspective with visibility across all technology domains deployed in the data center
- Quickly isolating problems with efficient root cause analysis … and no "war-room" finger pointing
- Understanding and prioritize incidents and events in terms of business impact
- Empowering your CAB to perform change impact analysis to understand ramifications and minimize disruptions
Then, when it comes time to implement the CMDB, you'll be able to automatically populate those dependency maps and service models into your ServiceNow CMDB.
We believe there is a multiplier effect here in terms of immediate benefits from dependency mapping and building service models that is further amplified when it comes time to complete the CMBD project and roll it out to the IT operations team.
It's something to think about on your journey, along with whether or not it makes sense to travel in kilometers.
