CMDB modeling and IT service quality

For me, this always has seemed to be a rather critical issue when defining the CMDB, and I am happy to see that the people at Gartner thinks so too. If you are going to deploy a CMDB, it is not enough to sit down and start to map theservices spontaneously: first, you have to stop and think about it a little bit.

If you have an opportunity, I recommend that you take a look at a study by Gartner, 4 Steps to Improve IT Service View CMDB Data Quality (G00341988) Without reinventing the wheel, this study reminds us of some obvious ideas that I would like to mention.

Gartner study: Choose the attributes of the CMDB wisely

El estudio comienza fuerte, tal que así: «Inaccurate configuration item data in an IT service view CMDB can delay incident resolution and degrade change quality«. Or in other words: modeling of the services in the CMDB, if done with bad data, would result in a degradation of the service quality or a slower resolution of incidents. And so, you couldn’t get off to a worse start.

Gartner’s analysts focused their study largely on the importance of a clear definition of the attributes to be managed for the CIs included within the scope of the CMDB. It is important to have a clear idea of the CIs, to have a clear idea of the services and of the interrelationships, but it is just as essential to consider:

• What attributes will we need?
• Why and for what purpose will we need these attributes?
• Who will be in charge of maintaining them and what methods will be used?
• Do we have the capacity to deal with this quantity of information?

Obviously, an incorrect decision regarding attributes has negative effects: “When inaccurate CI data is used, it increases the risk of self-inflicted outages to critical IT services when changes are made. It also slows down IT teams". You can say it louder, but not clearer: bad data = more risks; bad data = slower equipment.

Luckily, Gartner’s advice is very easy to understand: “Reduce the scope of configuration item data models by removing all attributes that do not either uniquely identify the configuration item or have a clearly defined use case”, or, paraphrasing, any information attribute that does not have a clearly defined use must be eliminated.

And I agree with it 100%!!

I hope that you enjoy it, and farewell

Jandro Castro.

PS: if you still have any doubts, don’t hesitate to take a look at this other post from a few months ago the CMDB and the Euribor,", maybe talking about mortgages and the Euribor will help you overcome your doubts...