One way to address the politics of the CMDB is to find a common starting point where constituencies can agree that current practices need improvement. Change management is an area where various IT groups can begin to collaborate around a CMDB.
That was the experience for Harry Butler, solutions center manager at electronics supplier EFW. Despite weekly change control meetings in which requests would be submitted and examined for potential problems, the company was still experiencing change-related outages.
"It never failed that the guy who knew about one piece of software on a box wasn't at the meeting," Butler says. "So we'd make a change during a maintenance window and shut something down." Butler says the CIO and the managers of each IT group meet to discuss common issues. They agreed that a CMDB might help them all. "We said, 'Hell yeah, let's give it a shot.'"
Another option is to start with a line of business, such as order management. In this case, various IT groups associated with a service assist with discovering all the pertinent CIs (configuration items), then populate the CMDB and map the topology of the service. This helps IT recognize all the pieces that support the service and get them under control.
In all cases, vendors and consultants advise against trying to discover every CI in the organization and map those relationships. By starting small and scaling up, IT will develop the processes and capabilities needed to extract value from the CMDB. Over time, it will grow as products, processes--and, hopefully, standards--mature.
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