CMDB in the NOC: Voices from the trenches

In my last column, I described the growing evidence that CMDB Systems (as in ITIL v3’s Configuration Management System) are beginning to support network operations teams as well as more traditional service desk and data center adopters. I made the analogy between the CMDB Systems of the present and future, and the NOC War Room single pane of glass – as IT organizations evolve to combine change management control with performance management and service assurance. This would enable IT to manage processes for reconfiguring critical network and systems devices while providing good dynamic visibility into actual configuration changes, service performance and service impact.

Once you see CMDB Systems in that light, it’s easier to make the bridge to the so-called War Room.

And given that premise, here are a few “voices from the trenches” taken from consulting and research over the last two years, including right up into the present.

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In my last column, I described the growing evidence that CMDB Systems (as in ITIL v3’s Configuration Management System) are beginning to support network operations teams as well as more traditional service desk and data center adopters. I made the analogy between the CMDB Systems of the present and future, and the NOC War Room single pane of glass – as IT organizations evolve to combine change management control with performance management and service assurance. This would enable IT to manage processes for reconfiguring critical network and systems devices while providing good dynamic visibility into actual configuration changes, service performance and service impact.

Once you see CMDB Systems in that light, it’s easier to make the bridge to the so-called War Room.

And given that premise, here are a few “voices from the trenches” taken from consulting and research over the last two years, including right up into the present.

One of the most compelling testimonies is in fact two years old, as an infrastructure-wide deployment, including network management, consolidated monitoring tools and health desk capabilities in a large financial services organization that charged for its IT support to multiple financial services companies:

“Our CMDB was an attempt to achieve world-class availability and at the same time control costs. With a $1 million in downtime for our whole ecosystem, and supporting 6,000 transactions a second, we reduced MTTR [mean time to recovery] by 70% through the CMDB initiative.”

In this case, data was accessed based on carefully defined “trusted sources” so that conflicting views of the same device or device attribute weren’t guaranteed to lead to a finger-pointing exercise. Consistent sources enabled better dialog and collaboration in resolving cross-domain issues. And the biggest challenge was, as usual, not technological but political.

Another voice from the trenches comes from an management service provider with responsibility for managing network and other devices across multiple organizations:

“Over the past three years, we’ve tied the CMDB in the change process, and then made sure that it would be supportive of our financial processes and financial systems. Over the course of the last three years we successfully disputed $2.5 million out of a $9 million spend.”

Here the clarity of knowing what you own, what services you’re getting, and what you’re responsible for managing saved this organization significant dollars.

A large communications and media services organization relayed a fairly telling story last year:

“We’ve been dreaming of a CMDB for seven years, well before anybody said the word ‘CMDB.’ We were in the process of developing our own internal software for the system when the idea of a CMDB System really took off. We started by developing a map of inventory and assets as they impacted services." This person managed a three-person team focused on the deployment. They included ITIL training, “not so much to become ITIL-compliant as to move the broader initiative forward."