CI Owners

[michaelwatts]

How have you and/or your organization addressed the issue of populating the (owned by, managed by and assigned to) fields in the CMDB as these can change often due to various reasons?

[Goran WitchDoc]

I would say that you group up the CIs into technical services, and you got a owner for each technical service. And it's in the technical service you got the common data.

But this is a hard question since it depends on how mature etc. the organisation is and what you are going to use it for etc.

[robertgeen]

I would agree with Goran on this as it is really more of a process question then anything. In my general experience try to keep it as high level in the organization structure as possible and if you can do it at a group level not at a specific individual level (as individuals can change). Also Data Certification can be your friend to help enforce and keep this data up to date.

Remember in most cases from a CMDB standpoint the owner is the person who is responsible for the accuracy of the CI data so keep that in mind as you choose a person and make sure they understand their role/responsibility.

[tim_sewell]

We have a large number of Business Services, 1000 currently, so we needed to have a good "automated" way to keep things current.   We came in at the Automated Business Services level and started assigning ownership of applications to individuals in either the Technical Services or Business Services class (we are using service mapping as well, and the query based associations of the Technical Services table were very useful to supplement entry points..)  

We implemented an ESS form for the owners to update the metadata around their applications, with approval processes in place, and a yearly scheduled task to remind them their apps need to be validated.   There is also a nightly scheduled task that checks if the owner left the company.   If so, it changes ownership of their applications to their manager.   This owner is then responsible for maintaining current groups and users in the other ownership/management/assignment fields as well.

Hope this helps!

[bernyalvarado]

Hi Tim,

What you share sounds very interesting. Can you please elaborate on the following:

and the query based associations of the Technical Services table were very useful to supplement entry points..

Which query based associations you're referring to?

Who does these supplement the entry points of a business service?

Would you mind providing an example?

Thanks,

Berny