A Simple Approach to Improving CMDB Quality

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A Simple Approach to Improving CMDB Quality

Ryan Fraser, DPSM, ITIL ExpertFUSION 16

© 2016 ServiceNow All Rights Reserved 2ConfidentialITIL is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

© 2016 ServiceNow All Rights Reserved 3Confidential

ServiceNow IT Service Management


How Important is CMDB Quality?A CMDB that is current, accurate, and complete is the linchpin for success in Service Management

• “Without a good Configuration Management capability, organizations suffer a 40% burden of intervention resources” - Institute of Configuration Management

• Poor quality data costs organizations an average of $14.2 million annually. - Gartner

• Poor data quality is a primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits. - Gartner


Decision Making with a Poor Quality CMDBSome of the most frequent ‘poor decisions’ that happen in organizations with poor quality CMDB data:

• Misunderstanding the impact of a planned change

• Not knowing what CI is causing a Major Outage, increasing MTRS

• Escalating to the wrong CI/Service Support Team

• Events are not correlated to the correct CI


The ServiceNow Approach


The overall CMDB health score consists of three major metrics which are correctness, compliance and completeness.

The ServiceNow Approach• CMDB Health Dashboard

• Overall Health Metrics



• Overall Health Metrics• Completeness

Recommended: Additional fields that should be populated for a CI to be considered complete

Required: Mandatory fields



• Overall Health Metrics• Completeness• Compliance

Audit: Perform scheduled or on-demand audits of CMDB data to determine which records match the expected attributes, CI relationships, and relationships to other records in the system.



• Overall Health Metrics• Completeness• Compliance• Correctness

Duplicate: Determines uniqueness based on Identification Rules

Orphan: Rule based check to identify Orphan records

Stale: Determines freshness if a CI is updated within the defined time period


Single System of Action• Managing CMDB quality is more than just collecting CI’s and reporting

• CMDB Health Audits drive actionable tasks

• Process governance ensures remediation and enables continual improvement

SLA’s

Workflow

Notifications


Key Takeaways

• A CMDB that is current, accurate and complete is the linchpin for success in Service Management

• Poor CMDB quality is costing organizations REAL $$$

• Manage CMDB quality with actionable insight into Completeness, Compliance, and Correctness.

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Want to learn more?Download the White Paper: Configuration Management Database: Improving Configuration Item Data QualityTake the CMDB Demo

Ryan Fraser Advisory Solutions Consultant

[email protected]

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow/documents/whitepapers/wp-cmdb-improving-configuration-item-data-quality.pdf





http://www.servicenow.com/lpdem/demonow-configuration-management-database.html

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A Simple Approach to Improving CMDB Quality