[ARTICLE] ITOM Is Not a Tooling Problem... It’s an Architecture Problem
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3 hours ago
So,
In the ServiceNow ecosystem, ITOM is often approached as a checklist:
Enable Discovery
Populate the CMDB
Turn on Event Management
Add Service Mapping
On paper, everything looks correct. In reality, operations teams still complain about noise, duplicated CIs, unclear impact, and low trust in the platform. From an architectural perspective, this outcome is predictable.
ITOM does not fail due to lack of capability. It fails due to lack of architectural intent. Discovery, Event Management, and Service Mapping are not independent features. They form a single operational system, and like any system, they amplify both good and bad design decisions. Poor data models, unclear ownership, and uncontrolled ingestion do not stay localized — they cascade.
One of the most common architectural mistakes is treating ITOM as a technical implementation rather than an operating model. Discovery is delegated to one team, CMDB governance to another, and Event Management to operations — often without a shared definition of success.
When that happens, Discovery becomes an ingestion engine without accountability, the CMDB becomes a passive database, and Event Management becomes an alert amplifier.
Architecturally mature organizations approach ITOM differently. They start by answering uncomfortable questions:
Which CI classes are authoritative?
Which data sources are allowed to create or update CIs?
What does “trusted data” actually mean for operations?
Who owns CI identity, not just CI records?
Until those questions are answered, ITOM will always feel unstable — regardless of configuration quality.
In practice, successful ITOM implementations focus less on adding features and more on controlling behavior. Scope is explicit. Ownership is visible. Data quality is continuously validated. And most importantly, the CMDB is treated as a decision engine, not a storage layer.
ITOM maturity is not measured by how much data you collect, but by how confidently teams can act on that data.
