UK&I CMDB Special Interest Group Virtual Meet-Up, 29th June – Post event summary

[Will T]

Thanks to all those that attended the CMDB SIG meeting on June 29^th, which this time was organised into several roundtable discussions. The following week was the London SNUG meeting where there were also a couple of CMDB-related roundtable discussions. Below is a selection of the key points that came up in the various discussions. Also attached are the introductory slides from the SIG, which include (slide 😎 links to the content from previous SIG meetings.

Feel free to add more info by commenting on this post or emailing steve.s@kumoritechnologies.com. We look forward to welcoming you to the next SIG meeting, scheduled for Tuesday 26^th September. More details will be posted here closer to the date.

Key Themes:

Customisation: The message these days from ServiceNow and partners is to avoid customisation if you possibly can and that was borne out by most participants who spoke about customising the CMDB at the events. Not only does it require effort to put in place in the first place but all too often organisations find that they become stuck in a difficult situation when it comes to maintaining across upgrades or worse, being unable to take advantage of new functionality as it becomes available on the platform.

What to do:

• If you’re thinking about customising your CMDB then do look for alternatives if you can.
• How to unpick a customised CMDB is a good topic for a future SIG – watch this space
• PS We’d be delighted to hear from anyone who has been through this process and who can share their lessons learned

Poor quality data: Another difficult situation to manage is when the CMDB contains a lot of poor quality data, perhaps because people have not been able to monitor their CMDB health in a rigorous way or have been unable to get their Identification / Reconciliation rules configured properly. In this situation, it’s not always easy to just delete the duplicates e.g. if they are referenced from other records.

What to do:

• How to organise a large-scale data cleansing is also good topic for a future SIG – watch this space
• PS As above, we’d be delighted to hear from anyone who has been through this process and who can share their lessons learned

CSDM: One of the customer speakers at the SNUG said that implementing CSDM in his organisation was one of the hardest tasks he’d ever worked on and again this was reflected by others in the roundtables. One of the main challenges here is just understanding the terminology, such as Business Service, Business Application, Application, Application Service & Technical Service. Also extremely challenging is the process of deciding on the best mix of applications and services for your organisation.

What to do:

• There are a number of free online resources, e.g. on YouTube, that cover CSDM from different perspectives
• This video is a use-case that the ServiceNow CSDM were directly involved with https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-blog/evolving-from-a-basic-cmdb-to-a-csdm-model-at-ca...

Getting business buy-in: Several spoke about the difficulties of convincing their organisations to invest in building a high quality CMDB and/or adopting CSDM alongside it. Barriers included a lack of understanding of the potential benefits, competing priorities within the organisation or for key individuals or even an entrenched view that investing in CMDB / CSDM would be a waste of money & time.

What to do:

• This is not easy!
• Try to find an exec sponsor who understands and can support the case
• Alternatively try to find a ‘consumer’ champion, someone who would benefit from having a CMDB in place. Someone from Service Operations would be a good candidate but also try Architect or Security teams.