IT Asset Management Solutions

Configuration Management Evolution - Picture of the London Eye - At ITAMS we understand the evolution to the CMDB world and we help organisations to establish practical CMDB and configuration management processes which enhance the control of key assets, key data items and their relationships to problem, incident and change. Ultimately this will lead to high value visibility of impact, availability of crucial management information and operational efficiency improvement.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) unfortunately defines configuration management in a rather loose way, leading over the last two to three years to confusion and difficulty in defining scope and business benefit as well as implementation challenges.

ITAMS experience tells us that there is a tendency to try to manage all IT objects and elements in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) design, but this this is doomed to failure in an organisation of any significant size. This is because the process maturity and data quality levels required to succeed are just not very acheivable in large organisations. Many organisations also confuse asset repository and CMDB. Although there are overlaps the CMDB is an evolved asset repository, connecting asset information to ITIL objects like change request, incident and problem in a much more holistic and integrated way. Based on experience we believe that 'stand alone' CMDB's just dont deliver results.

Today, the CMDB is beginning to replace the old asset database concept and considerably enhancing it. In the future, from this place key IT infrastructure will be governed and the CMDB will be the control through which builds, alerts, assets, software packages and all the services connected to them are managed, ultimately acting as a data warehouse and dashboard for impact and status assessment.

Experience shows that large organisations are comparatively mature if they can achieve a direct link between critical server assets, the services they relate to and the change tickets that are raised against them, underpinned by periodic discovery policing to make sure the assets are still there and functioning. Effective joined up IT Service Management processes and high quality data policing methods are relatively speaking in their infancy in most organisations. Yet even this position generates huge value for an organisation in terms of control, impact reduction and management information.

Is your organisation able to tell what assets are deployed in your data centre and how they are built vs what is supposed to be there? Do you get alerts when there is an important difference? No? Call us.