Business reasons to commit to a CMDB
As you prepare next year's budget or review this year's budget don't make the mistake of introducing more tools without thinking through your people, processes, and current technology. Like many IT leaders you face complex challenges around IT security, value to the business, and strategic direction. More times than you would like to admit, pushing more technology into your organization seems like the right thing to do for budget and IT steering plans. This is the time to re-evaluate your approach to transforming your IT operations department into a business service department. Ask your self if it makes sense to pay to monitor one more nodes on a server, or if it makes more sense to empower your operations team to respond to the nodes you are already paying to monitor? The investments you have made into software tools provide your IT operations team with great information that is usually self contained and not consumable by business owners or senior leadership. This causes a gap which does not allow you to quickly identify and respond to critical service outages, thus disabling senior leadership with decision making data. It is at this point where the calls, emails, and text start flooding the entire IT staff. Do not despair, there is hope and it is in the form of a CMDB to provide availability and visibility so the business and IT services are aligned.
"This is the time to re-evaluate your approach to transforming your IT operations department into a business service department."
The idea of a CMDB may seem daunting and an effort that competes with other strategic IT plans, mandates, budgets, etc. Why even bother you might ask? Well, lets start with a few facts:
- Estimated 80% of unplanned outages are caused by unplanned changes
- Estimated 60% of availability and performance errors due to misconfiguration
- Average cost of critical service per hour is $110,000
- Business reputation and brand value are placed in jeopardy
This information is not here to scare you. Many of you are aware of the costs and likely causes of service interruptions. Even more of you have probably experienced these unfortunate service outages. Does the idea of application and infrastructure visibility and availability seem out of reach now? Would one more isolated tool prevent the service outage, provide crystal clear awareness of the issue, and position you to communicate with your customers before they contact you? These are all questions you need to answer before you decide that a CMDB is not the right decision.
"…probably experienced these unfortunate service outages."
Now that we have reprioritized the commitment to a CMDB and justified the decision with a few outage impact stats its time to share your new vision with senior leadership. In order to avoid a 'soft cost vs hard cost' discussion I would recommend that you use your own critical or tier 1 applications as an example of what is currently not visible and causing financial impact to the business. The key to this conversation is to identify potential lost revenue for the business. This journey is really a three step process for senior business leaders to digest and support you as you transition IT from an operations team to a service delivery team. Below is a visual of the process and formulas used to establish the business reasons to commit to a CMDB effort. Thank you and best of luck as you pursue this transformation in your business.
The potential revenue impact is calculated with the following formulas:
- LR = (GR/TH) x I x H
- LR — Lost Revenue
- GR — Gross Yearly Revenue
- TH — Total Yearly Business Hours
- I — Percentage of Impact
- H —number of hours outage
- AC = LR x AHO
- AC — Annual Cost
- LR — Lost Revenue
- AH — Annual Hours of Outage
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