Greetings and salutations from the trenches of doing good things… If you remember my last posting I addressed the steps on HOW TO CREATE A CMDB (the walls shake). What I wanted to do is to provide some insight into the steps in the next series of postings. I welcome the opportunity for debate and discuss. So please, do not hesitate to ask away.

So the first step in building a CMDB is documenting the organizations current state.

The logic being that in order to induce organizational change which is what creating a CMDB is all about. The project team needs to develop a comprehensive understanding of the current environment. While this does include a need to understand the current technology in place, this is secondary to understanding the processes in which daily business is conducted. Typically these daily activities require coordination across organizational structure. As a result, understanding the current environment requires interviewing a complete listing of business process owners and product owners that supporting the business of IT. The following points are some of the information that needs to be collected from the meetings:

1. Current process flows
2. Listing of products and integration that constitute the current environment.
3. Current Organizational structure (Published and unpublished)
4. Listing of on-going current and future projects
5. Understanding of how IT assets are being managed
6. Definition of an IT asset
7. Understanding of how change is managed

After the interviews have been completed there is a significant amount of documenting, analysis and strategic thinking that is needed to complete this task. This should include identifying process gaps which normally are found where one process owner?s organizational responsibilities ends and another begins. In addition, the process needs to ensure integrity of the data that will be included in the CMDB. This will involve a review of the IMAC processes that should manage IT Assets.

In closing, I want to say that this step is more art than science to be affective. This requires a specific team skill set to properly document an organization?s current state. It should be understood that this activity lays the ground work for the future project. That being said, while there is a set of standard questions that can be leveraged to be asked, the secret is in the listening and accuracy in the process of gathering information.

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