University taps ITIL to build open source CMDB

Faced with an overhaul to its IT service management strategy, the IT team at Brigham Young University decided to start at the bottom.

"We needed to build a better foundation for our IT departments," says Neil Jon Harrington, director of data-center facilities operations for the Office of IT at BYU.

In 2002 BYU built a new data center, and in 2003, the Provo, Utah, university merged operations teams with its parent organization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The convergence of the two organizations promised to maximize resources among the like-minded groups, but also posed a challenge to those heading up the initiative. The groups wanted to share data across the university campus and affiliated sites, but IT wasn't sure how to bring the disparate data stored on various systems together -- and then enable centralized and role-based access to the data from different locations.

"It's important for the organizations to share information, but when you are faced with everything from Microsoft Access to spreadsheets to Post-It notes and napkins as part of your information management system, the idea of finding a common method seems daunting," Harrington says.

One staff member had worked with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in a previous position and pointed Harrington to the best-practices framework as a place to start solving their data management and sharing problem.

"I was negative going into ITIL because in my experience, I had yet to see anything good come out of something so seemingly bureaucratic. It looked to me like a big fat book of red tape," Harrington says. "I can't say it was my personal decision, but it was very sensible, reasonable and covered many aspects of what we needed to do. And I was very pleasantly surprised and am still quite satisfied with that choice."

How ITIL fit

Specifically, Harrington found ITIL's best practices around incident, problem, change and configuration management would address the issue of how to make two operations teams act as one.

BYU has some 32,000 students and 8,000 full-time employees. LDS has 12 million members, some of whom tap the organization's Web site, which also falls under Harrington's management. Harrington oversees Windows and Macintosh desktops, as well as a mix of 1,500 Linux, HP-UX and IBM AIX servers within the data center. The two organizations continue to maintain separate engineering teams, but Harrington believed a common database of configuration items and IT assets would be the best start to a larger ITIL implementation.

"The configuration management database [CMDB] would serve as the piece underpinning all of the ITIL processes," he says.

By definition, a CMDB serves as a repository for configuration data about IT assets including applications, operating systems, patches, hardware models, life-cycle costs and user connections. For Harrington, the CMDB represented a foundation for BYU's best-practices deployment. The two-step project involved establishing a baseline of items and assets to track, then attaching values to them and their attributes in the CMDB. Once established, Harrington says people would agree not to modify the database without appropriate change-approval processes.