As most of you know, EMA has been actively working to research and develop best practices around the planning and deployment of the IT Infrastructure Library's Configuration Management Database. ITIL's CMDB has taken off in part because it represents a trusted foundation to enable best practices to support IT service management - across disciplines.
 
In ITIL's words, the CMDB should "hold the relationships between all system components including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases.  It also contains information about employees, locations, suppliers and business units. Automated processes to load and update the Configuration Management Database should be developed where possible so as to reduce errors and reduce costs. Discovery tools, inventory and audit tools, enterprise systems and network management tools can be interfaced with the CMDB. These tools can be used initially to populate the CMDB, and subsequently to compare the actual 'live' configuration with the records stored in the CMDB." 

Architecturally, most vendors rightly view this as an evolutionary requirement that will demand some federation of data, similar to a CMDB system. From an architectural perspective, the value of ITIL's CMDB becomes hauntingly similar to requirements that some vendors within the industry are seeking to evolve towards - a design point in which data gathered by any management application is accessible to any other management application, based on policy, across brands  - a Nirvana-like state of data integration and reconciliation.

In EMA's recent Webinar, I recommend a big vision - with organizational, process and technology assessments - combined with opportunistic "baby steps" for moving forward with CMDB deployments. Such steps targeting pain points and readiness would likely show strong ROI in the near term.

During the Webinar we polled the audience of about 100 participants to see where they were in CMDB deployments. While this was hardly a scientific study (EMA will be doing more quantitative research here in the coming year) and one in which the audience was somewhat self-selecting (i.e. they had proactively listened into the Webinar) - I felt the results were still a little surprising and worth sharing.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.