Welcome to the New Jersey itSMF LIG

Recognizing the need to have a local Service Management forum to network and share knowledge,
we support the Local Interest Group for New Jersey.

The February 2012 Meeting was a Great Success!

NEW JERSEY itSMF LIG Meeting
Monday, February 6, 2012

 Presentation:  Major CMDB Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Summary

The NJ LIG 1st quarter 2012 meeting focused on the challenges related to the Configuration Management Database.   We thank everyone for attending and contributing to a very interesting discussion. Margaret Hanlon led the discussion and the session was extremely interactive with lots of sharing of ideas and experiences.

In her presentation Margaret spoke about the “Major CMDB Gotchas and How to Avoid Them”.  As an ITSM consultant some of the typical challenges that she has observed are:
* Bad Data - Data is not managed - data goes stale
* Huge Data Repository- The CMDB quickly develops into a massive repository that is impossible to manage
* Error Prone Manual Data Entry - Even with discovery tools, there is still a need for manual data entry which is prone to error.  We underestimate the degree of manual data entry required.
* Expectations Set Too High - People expect the CMDB to replace all the spreadsheets that exist in IT

Some best practices that we would like to share that came out of the discussion are:
* Start with one critical service and build a service view of the Configuration Items (CIs) in relation to that service. Don’t be concerned with collecting a lot of information (i.e. attributes) about each CI.  If you simply have the relationships between the CIs and the IT service you can provide value.  It was a unanimous feeling among the meeting participants that it is best to follow an iterative approach, keeping it simple to begin with, so with each iteration additional value is delivered.
* Another observation was that being able to link Incident, Change, and Problem tickets to the CIs and to the IT Service (which is also a CI) provides tremendous value to the users of the CMDB.  (This is what is referred to in ITIL as part of a Configuration Management System)
* Several meeting participants shared that they have integrated Incident Management and the CMDB and populated a root cause Configuration Item to help the support teams resolve incidents.  This is an interesting concept.
* Data ownership is always a challenge.  One participant shared that they have signed agreements with the data owners that clearly define what is expected.  If people want to have data in the CMDB they need to sign up to be responsible for it. 

Overall we had a great exchange of information.  It was to the point that nobody took time out to have refreshments (we will make sure we allow for a break at the next meeting)! We thank our volunteers who made this February meeting such a success. We hope to see you at the next NJ LIG meeting.   It is a terrific opportunity to meet and network with other practitioners and professionals who are facing the same IT management challenges (they might just have a solution or idea you have been looking for!).  Date and topic of next meeting will be posted shortly.

Why not join the LinkedIn Group “itSMF NJ LIG” to see the latest news and to start to network with us and other members.