Gartner IOM Conference: CMDB Success

Another topic that was popular during the recent Gartner Infrastructure Operations Management show this week was the change management database or CMDB. Patricia Adams, Gartner Research Director and Ronni Colville, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst hosted a session titled “Ensuring Your CMDB Success”.

Because there are many views and statistics being thrown around about the CMDB these days, it was interesting to see Patricia and Ronni use a couple of survey questions to get a sense of where things stand among conference attendees.

First off, it appears that most companies at the conference are going down the CMDB path – eventually, at least. The session attendees were asked where they are in the CMDB process, here is a break out of the answers:

• 33% are currently in progress with a CMDB
• 19% will start a CMDB efforts in 6 months
• 12% will start a CMDB in 6-12 months
• 20% will start a CMDB by the end of 2009
• 9% are not planning a CMDB

There seems to be quite a bit of traction (both now and in the future), that also maps to the results of the IT Skeptic’s survey. A number of companies are already working on a CMDB and good number plan to continue work.

Another survey question showed additional interesting results. About half of the attendees were implementing ITIL v2 and about ten percent were implementing v3. This would seem to indicate that the deployment of a CMDB is actually outpacing ITIL adoption. This is an ironic occurrence since the CMDB term actually stems from ITIL in the first place.

Regardless, Ronni also had some points of consideration for companies looking to implement a CMDB:

1. Ensure that CMDB data is accurate. Whatever data you include in the CMDB to be reliable to be effective.
2. Test to make sure CMDB is trusted. Is IT running the data regularly with proper effect?
3. Agree on why you are implementing CMDB. It is important to quantify the value of the effort given the length of time that implementation may take.
4. Choose your CMDB vendor wisely. There are no standards for CMDB today, so different vendors may be using different methodologies.

One goal of the CMDB is to improve visibility into the impact of a change. To the extent that this will reduce downtime, we think this is a good thing. However, as Patricia and Ronni pointed out, CMDB projects are very complicated and require considerable effort to provide value. It seems the work will continue for some time.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations, ITIL