For a company like mine, keeping pace with the evolution of ITIL and all it encompasses is a necessary task, so we can ensure that the IT Asset, Service and Security Management tools that we develop can at least fulfill ITIL’s requirements when in the right hands. So your post here was very useful, and the comments about the ‘federated’ nature of an organization’s CMDB much appreciated.

There is one aspect of Configuration information which I feel is very often missed from these schemas, in relation to the application software installed across an organization. That is, there is usually no information on the profile of usage of the application, at either the individual desktop level, or indeed across the organization as a whole. Once an application has been rolled out, it tends to get accepted as simply ‘there’, and there is no information as to whether it is actually used, by who and how much.

We sometimes get pulled into discussion of the introduction of application streaming, which is great and exciting technology, but we usually have to start by pulling people back to the basics, installing our Application Usage Monitoring component, and finding out more about just what software the organization is really using.

I see the CMDB as the natural default repository for this information, but would appreciate your comments on that idea.