What does CMDB CI Ownership involve?

[MZC]

Which topic areas cover Implementation of a CMDB and Best Practice management of CMDB records via a Service Configuration Management process which is part of ITSM activities such as Change, Incident, Release Mgmt. I am interested in finding out how some orgs have implemented what I call "Configuration Item Ownership" process which encompasses a checklist of activities which CI Owners are responsible for, in reference to the validation of CIs in the CMDB which support Services a CI Owner Owns or Manages.  Does that make sense?  To what extent do you allow a CI Owner to have access to CI records in the CMDB to update attributes or are all updates performed by a specific eCMDB Admin team; is the Change Product Module open to all users in the organization where they can submit a Change ticket or is the Change Module only open to users who are identified as CI Owners? Any documentation on what CI Ownership means in regards to roles and responsibilities and how the CI Owner interacts with the CMDB and ServiceNow Platform via different product areas would be helpful.

[EricDohr]

Check out the process workshop for CMDB in NowCreate. https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&asset_id=3054c3838795d9d8af9f213acebb35c5

[dxjohnson]

Great questions (some of which I am also asking). So where are the answers? "Watch a video" doesn't help. Oi. I get frustrated with ServiceNow community in general for this approach. I don't ask questions for Socrates to appear, 

[Ben Schlick]

There are many layers to "CI Ownership", each of which depend on business processes to determine their specific function. Generally speaking, Ownership is managed through group identification; Support Group, Change Group, Managed by Group, and Approval Group.

Support Group - which group receives incidents against this device, also corresponds with Service Offering.

Change Group - implements change device(s)

Approval Group - approves/denies changes for device(s)

Managed by Group - manages CI and CI data while directly supporting a service

Focusing on Managed by Group and Support Group

-Organizations logically group people into Company (core_company) -> Business Unit (business_unit) -> and (cmn_department). When it comes to identifying Technical Services, there's usually a 1:1 relationship with Infrastructure Team=Technical Service. 

ACME Core Company

-Business Unit A

-Business Unit - CIO

--Department - Infrastructure

---Assignment Group(s)---

---Platform Services (P)

----Windows Services (C)

----Linux Services (C)

---Network Services (P)

----Switching

----Routing

----Telecom/VOIP

--Department - Applications

--Department - Facilities Management

--Department - Service/Help Desk

-Business Unit C

-Business Unit D

Often times the Support Group and the Managed by Group are the SAME people. As Servers are added to the environment, the majority will be supported by the Platform(windows/linux) support teams AND the same team will be required to Manage the CI throughout its lifecycle.

The added responsibility comes with extra requirements. As the CI Owner/Manager(s), these individuals must define and document the operational applications/tools used supporting their environment. For Server infrastructure, there's an infinite list of options but the overall guidance is to use the oob/recommended integration from the vendor to/from servicenow. This process is the same for each environment, Network, database, storage, application, etc.

The CMDB Health Scorecard provides the audit and automated remediation if the previously identified processes are being utilized. The Health Scorecard runs automated processes to identify critical requirements for each Configuration Item/Table.

*Completeness - Identifies missing recommended and required attributes for each CI.

*Compliance - Audits security requirements for each CI

*Correctness - Duplicate CIs, Orphan CIs, Stale CIs

*Configuration Items that fail CMDB Health checks leverage the associated Group depending on the task. Managed by Group, Support Group, Approval Group, Change Group*

*CMDB Data Manager leverages these group assignments for automated data management policies*

[dxjohnson]

Thanks for the legit answer Ben. 🙂