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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