Is the business value of a CMDB all about Change Control? And what if your organization performs root cause analysis? Do you really need a CMDB? We’ll address these and other CMDB, Change and Configuration Management issues in a new series of blogs this month.

As enterprises and their IT support organizations grow, their infrastructures become increasingly fragmented and spread across a variety of functions, technologies and organizations. As this IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ continues, efficiency, optimization and overall control over IT resources suffers. Organizations often address the IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ issue with automated or, in some cases manual, Change ‘root cause’ analysis tools. These tools analyze changes, in many cases failed changes, to get at the ‘root cause’ of the problem.

Although root cause analysis is critical to the improvement of change control, analysis that doesn’t take into account all configuration items (CIs) and their inter-relationships can be reactive, incomplete and in some cases, downright ineffective. Spreadsheets and manually maintained asset and specific purpose configuration repositories also do not sufficiently take into account the inter-relationships of CIs and can fall far short of effective root cause analysis for complex IT infrastructures.

So here’s my proposition - change process and CMDB are ‘partners’ in executing the work of IT efficiently and accurately. At the highest level, change is the workflow of IT and the CMDB is the information store that provides data to support the decision-making process. This partnership is the functionality that drives an efficient change flow engine.

Until next time,

Don

Also, don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar and learn how to Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

What do you think about the relationship between Change and Configuration Management? Download Evergreen’s newest white paper on the subject: “The Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB”.

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