CMDB, ITIL and ITAM - Could It Be They’re All Related?
Last blog I talked about CMDB and its relationship to overall Service Level Management. What about is relationship to ITAM and Asset Management?
Oftentimes enterprises believe that if they have an asset management database, they also have a CMDB database. There is a fundamental difference and an important link.
IT Asset Management is the discipline of managing finances, contracts and usage of IT assets throughout their lifecycles for the purpose of maintaining an optimal balance between business service requirements, total costs, budget predictability and contractual and regulatory compliance. ITAM activities include the management of inventory, software licenses, vendors, procurement, leases, warranties, cost accounting, retirement and disposal.
The goal of Configuration Management, on the other hand, is to provide a logical model of the IT infrastructure that is accessed by all ITIL processes, the purpose of which is to drive consistency among them. Configuration activities include identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the versions of configured items (CIs). CI information should be stored in a single repository, or a Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB).
So here’s the link - the only difference between a given component in an asset management database or a CMDB is whether it is considered an ‘asset’, a ‘CI’ or both. The difference is only determined by what you do or plan to do with that component.
A component should be considered an ‘asset’ if you decide it is worth managing a contract, cost or usage attribute, throughout its lifecycle. In other words, does that component have an asset that is calculated ‘on the books’, such as software licenses or hardware maintenance contracts?
A component is considered a ‘CI’ if you decide it is worth managing operationally for incidents, problems, changes, releases, capacity, etc.
So there are three points to my ramblings:
- If the same component can classified as both an asset and a CI, it can be managed for both administrative and operational purposes.
- An asset management database is an important underpinning to the development of CMDB database.
- ITAM and ITIL’s best practice Configuration Management share the need for reliable data about components in the IT environment. Thus discovery tools (a scalable means of keeping accurate data on deployed components) and a CMDB (a repository for reconciling and accessing the discovered data) can serve both ITAM and Configuration Management.
ITAM and ITIL are both key IT improvement processes and all IT processes that rely on and contribute to CIs are dependent upon an accurate CMDB to provide best practice service level management.
So I’ll say it again- what is good for the CMDB is good for ITIL and overall service level management. And it starts with an asset management database.
So what do you think?
Don
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Agreed.
Just as the most critical part of ITIL is the interfaces between the processes so the so is the interface between ITAM or Asset Management in general with Configuration Management. The ITAM/CM link is very much a business/IT link and is frought with same FUD as the link between AppDev and operations although, in my experience, it is much easier to sort out the former than the latter.
Asset management is addressed rather obliquely in the Software Asset Management book of V2. I think this is because Asset Management is largely a financial function that hasn’t changed much since kings wanted to know how much treasure they had. However in V3 it is explicitly included and tied to Configuration Management as “Service Asset and Configuration Management”. IT Asset Management is a dependency and an absolute prerequisite of Configuration Management.
Your CMDB will only be as good as your AMDB. I have learned that the first step to assessing configuration management is to understand the state of their asset management data with regard to integrity, accuracy and avialability. Alas, what I find more often than not is that IT Asset Management has less rigor around it than Asset Management in general.
Equally important is that the AMDB must be seperate although accessible from the CMDB. More often than not I find that there is some mixture of the two and they are about as compatible as Incident and Problem management…..different objectives and purposes. Very much like siamese twins that share some organs but have different minds, and equally difficult to seperate.
So start with clear definition of the two management areas, asset and config. Establish a policy for each with thier objectives, scopes, and deliverables. Being able to juxtapose them much like the plug and outlet will take you a long ways in turning the heel dragging resistance into the ‘eureka’ light bulb needed to get you on the road to effective Configuration Management.
In part, I think this a problem of system design. CMDB and ITAM are both related functions. In the real world they interface so why not implement a comprehensive tracking and management system that adequately models your work processes and infrastructure?
Where should ITAM report to in a very large global IT organization, as per industry best practices? I know that finance was the place many times in the past, but now that we are moving to a more meshed ITAM/Configuration Mgmt structure wouldn’t this change? Should ITAM, Config Mgmt, Incident Mgmt, Change Mgmt, etc. report into a centralized ITSM structure? or on a function by function basis? Is there any consensus in the indusrty? Thank you.