How a small business can use CMDB information
The first article on this topic introduced Configuration Management whilst the second started to explain how a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) starts to come together and also explained how SME’s have a huge advantage over larger organisations. But it’s OK having an advantage, but if you are never going to use the information its just a waste of effort. So here are a few ways that a CMDB may assist an SME with managing its IT estate:
1) Inventory Management – The simplest use of the information in your CMDB is to keep tags on your IT inventory. Whether it is to assist with your annual accounts, to provide a financial value of your IT estate or to clearly demonstrate what pieces of IT equipment you need to get back off of people when they leave, linking people and locations to the basic level of CI information gives you immediate control. Add financial value to the CI and suddenly you have a true valuation of your IT equipment.
2) Upgrade strategy – By linking how your pieces of IT equipment are dependent on each other, when you come to upgrade you can clearly see what parts outside of the most obvious considerations may need to be reviewed. It could be that an application currently runs with its data held on a central server. By upgrading the application, it may also mean that you need to upgrade the operating system on your server. But what about all of the other applications that link to this server? Will they operate with the new level of operating system? By reviewing your configuration diagrams, the other considerations of your upgrade will come to light.
3) Upgrade strategy – With most organisations being Microsoft based the ongoing need to upgrade both operating systems and office applications is becoming more regular. By including all of your PC estate as CI’s and by recording basic information such as processor speed, size of hard drive and RAM, decisions about how much of your estate will take the upgrade and how much needs to have money spent on it bringing up to minimum spec are quite straight forward.
4) System failure – When something goes wrong, a picture really does paint a thousand words! Those decisions made 3 years ago when you were putting the system in added to the changes made 6 months ago are easily understood when viewed as a simple system diagram. You can now start to look at your service and try to work out what may be causing the disruption. This is also useful if a known component (eg your broadband line) fails. By reviewing all of the CI’s attached or dependant on this item, the size of your problem can be assessed very quickly
5) Cost reduction program – Whether it is making your known assets work harder, deciding not to buy something because all of a sudden you realise that you have a spare one or carrying out a review of your services to consolidate your supplier’s, the presence of configuration information can lead to cost savings. This is not an easy task as the ground work a developing your CMDB need to be done first BUT once you have your CMDB in place it should be fairly straight forward to review your IT estate an identify where possible cost savings could be made.
Goitil’s consultancy services are designed to help SME’s reduce their costs by implementing the right level of ITIL discipline for their business, without impeding on your day to day operation. The starting point is our free health check which will allow your consultant to start identifying how your configuration information can increase your service availability and reduce your costs.
