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This is the final instalment of our CMDB trilogy, where we first asked the question “Is your CMDB data treated as importantly as it should be?” We explored how major organisations have exploited a well-controlled CMDB. In part two, “Visualising the Model,” we looked at an important but often overlooked area of advertising the CMDB to your stakeholders, and how we can position it so that it makes sense to them. This drives impetus from the top down, to improve and polish the CMDB so that it can be trusted and leveraged by more efficient processes.
In the third and final episode, we’ll be considering your own current CMDB, how well it is populated and the level of data quality: we ask the question, “is your CMDB sunny side up?”
How do you know if your CMDB is having a “sunny” day?
This might be a question you’ve been asked by your CEO, internal auditors, third party suppliers or perhaps your industry regulators. A high quality CMDB in ServiceNow should be based on the wider CSDM model, and must always be measured for population and quality. The trick is not to try and reach 100% accuracy, but have a “known” quality position, even if 5% is known to be “bad.” This provides you with a clear, measurable target, which can be reduced over time.
In our experience, there tend to be pockets of good practice, ordered data within any organisation, either within ServiceNow or sometimes well-managed in spreadsheets. Larger organisations may also have the view that their CMDB data is fairly good and merely requires a little TLC to make it tip top. What actually happens is that local knowledge, off tool spreadsheets, process or governance avoidance is giving the false impression that the data is good, when in fact the data is not being used at all.
CMDB vs CSDM - discovered & non-discovered
Within your business, you’ve probably recognised that some areas of your CMDB, such as servers, have been easy to populate and keep up to date because you’ve deployed ServiceNow Discovery or an equivalent technology discovery integration. Control and measurement is still required though, as data sources may not be as good as expected - or more commonly, conflict with other sources of data in the CMDB.
The CSDM, however, prescribes items such as Services and Service Offerings be loaded into the CMDB – they are Cis, in the CMDB Schema. But these elements, along with business applications and business capabilities, are organisation-centric and undiscoverable, hence there will always be a degree of manual activity surrounding them.
Sustainability in mind
The conclusion here is that with your business over time, the CMDB may have expanded through organic growth and suffered from too many cooks in the kitchen trying to improve things. Which is fine – so long as there is adequate governance of the model. It’s good practice to understand and document the strategy and operating model in order to sustain the model itself. Get that in a good place first so that data population and quality has a sound base.
With an understanding and agreement of the model and each class, how it should be used, who uses it, and under what conditions and for which processes, measurement and control activities can then be overlayed to build up the operating model and ways of working. This approach is important to deliver a sustainable CMDB that is fit for use today, tomorrow and everyday moving forward – so that it's always sunny side up.
Trusted source of truth
With a sound base and an operating model, the ServiceNow CMDB and associated Configuration Management processes can be configured to deliver a trusted source of truth that is always having a good day. Features such as field access control, data certification, regular record assessments, ownership control, reporting and dashboards are there to provide the known position of your CMDB. Unifii have the experience and skills to deliver CMDB projects, whether that be simple health reviews, complex assessments of heavily customized CMDB tables, or full green field deployment.
If your CMDB is having a bad day, or you’d just like some more info, please get in touch here to discuss how we can help.
