Talking about the top three reasons people say they’re working on implementing a CMDB
According to Network World, in this CMDB adoption: What some numbers tell us and why article, they have found three top drivers or motivations for CMDB implementations:
1. Change and Configuration Management (also named Release, Change and Configuration Management)
2. Service Assurance
3. Problem and Incident Management
Interestingly, “Asset and Inventory” was fourth on one survey, but when asked if CMDB was going to be used for “Asset Management” instead, that category fell even further out of the list of reasons to implement a CMDB. Read the article for the full story and details.
In the IT Discovery Suite talk I went to at the BMC Forum, these are some of the items that we see are driving discovery tool needs. While not necessarily directly related to CMDB implementations, I see a coupling, and definitely our discovery tools can populate a CMDB. However, I wonder if asset management isn’t as much of a focus, and there are plenty of other pain points to choose from. In case you need a pain point. I’m guessing most of us don’t need more pain points, but here you go.
Common pain drivers
- Don’t know what assets are deployed or their inter-dependencies
- Over- and under-buying of assets
- Cost, risk of software license and regulatory compliance
- Change Control vs. Change Management
- No insight into the impact of IT health on business activities
- Long resolution times
- Missed SLAs
Common project drivers
- Inventory
- Software license management
- Regulatory compliance
- ITIL® best practices (e.g. configuration management)
- CMDB initiative
- Application & Patch Management
- Server consolidation
- OS Migration
- Root cause analysis
- Intelligent Trouble ticket generation
You can take the survey for Network World yourself. What projects or pain points are driving your CMDB projects?