Achieving ITSM success with configuration management

This can be linked to an increasing dependence on IT to deliver critical business services and the need for business to align with IT. By Brian Johnson

To ensure the success of their ITSM initiatives, organisations must be able to consistently and reliably identify, manage and verify IT infrastructure components that underlie services provided to the business. Accomplishing this requires a thorough understanding of ITSM, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), configuration management and the configuration management database (CMDB) – and how they work together.

The CMDB is a database used to manage configuration records throughout their lifecycle. The CMDB tracks and records the attributes of each configuration item (CI) and relationships between CIs. Since all service management processes utilize the CMDB, they can be especially useful in the implementation of ITIL best practices. However, the role that configuration management and CMDBs play in ITIL implementation is often misunderstood.

The ITIL best practice framework was developed in the UK by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now part of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), to promote quality ITSM. In fact, The OGC develops and updates the ITIL standard in conjunction with the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF), a worldwide independent not-for-profit membership organisation. The itSMF and its membership contribute to the development of ITIL and associated ITSM standards.

The ITIL glossary defines ITSM is defined as “the implementation and management of quality IT Services that meet the needs of the business.” ITSM is performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.

Configuration management is critical to managing and controlling the complexity of software projects being developed today. Configuration management is responsible for maintaining and managing information about the CIs throughout their lifecycle. The primary objective of configuration management is to underpin the delivery of IT services by providing accurate data to all ITSM processes when and where needed.

ITSM and ITIL

ITSM leverages ITIL best practices, along with details, process activity requirements, procedures, roles and responsibilities to deliver long-term benefits to the business. These practices have been defined as a series of processes grouped within two key implementation areas: service support and service delivery.

Service support is the practice of those disciplines which enables IT services to be provided and includes:

• Incident management – restore services with minimal business disruption.
• Problem management – minimize the adverse affect of IT problems.
• Change management – determine required changes, and implement with minimum adverse impact.
• Configuration management – identify, control and verify configurations supporting IT services.
• Release management – ensure that only tested and correct versions of hardware and software are provided.

Service desk is a function of service support that provides a single, central point of contact for all users of IT within the organisation. The service desk function handles incidents, service and change requests and provides an interface to the other service support processes.

Service delivery is the management of the IT services themselves, and involves a number of management practices to ensure that IT services are provided as agreed between the service provider and the customer. Service delivery practices include:

• Service level management – create service agreements with customers about IT services, and implement and monitor those agreements.
• Availability management – ensure the appropriate level of resources to support the availability of IT services.
• Financial management for IT services – provide cost effective control over IT assets and resources.
• Capacity management – ensure that adequate capacity is available to meet business requirements, balancing supply with demand.
• IT service continuity management – prepare and plan disaster recovery procedures for IT services.

Configuration management process

When implemented as part of a configuration management initiative, the CMDB helps organisations deliver cost-effective, high quality IT services by maintaining accurate details of IT components and the services they support.

The objective of the configuration management process is to provide a logical model of the infrastructure or a service by identifying, controlling, maintaining, verifying and reporting on existing CIs. Configuration management keeps track of all the relationships and dependencies within an enterprise, regardless of whether they are hardware-driven, software-driven, or cross physical locations, networks, platforms or servers.

The value of a decision within an organisation depends greatly on the quality and accuracy of the information on which it is based. Partial or outdated information diminishes that value and the data yielded and may even render it worthless.

Some information may already exist in formal or informal databases, spreadsheets, flat files or even in employees’ desktops or (worse) memories. Unfortunately, if these islands of information are disconnected or difficult to find, they cannot be relied on to support critical decision-making. By leveraging the CMDB, configuration management addresses connect these information islands to improve performance, increase process maturity and empower decision-making.

The role of the CMDB

The CMDB’s functional data repository unifies and simplifies the management of IT relationships and reconciles disparate data sources in the context of business priorities to provide full visibility into CIs. The CMDB enables organisations to effectively support and control critical IT disciplines including change, configuration, incident and problem management.

What’s driving the need for CMDBs in large and small organisations? Keeping pace with the velocity and complexity of changes made to the infrastructure is daunting. Uncontrolled IT change threatens the stability and reliability of critical IT services to the business. The constantly changing IT environment makes it difficult to understand – and more importantly manage – relationships between business services and the CIs that support them. As a result, IT is left defenseless against the onslaught of uncontrolled changes in the infrastructure and is unable to gauge the impact to business operations.

Other factors driving the need for CMDBs include:

• Unending change demands where uncontrolled, unplanned change endangers business processes.
• Incomplete configuration control resulting in ineffective, risk-laden IT support of business processes.
• Unrecognized IT relationships resulting in a lack of understanding between IT cause and effect.
• Disparate data sources, which yield information gaps that increase management risks.
• Inconsistent service level performance that can cripple IT credibility and ability to support business.
• Insufficient root cause analysis leading to ineffective change requests with indeterminable risks.

What are some of the benefits of the CMDB? The CMDB ensures business services are delivered more reliably because of a thorough understanding of how the infrastructure is tied to them and reduces risk of downtime due to proactive change management. Risk analysis is simplified because relationships are well understood. The CMDB also inventories all relevant CIs and dependencies that enable change management, which ensure infrastructure inventory is up-to-date at all times. The CMDB delivers proactive risk analysis to avoid incidents and effective root cause analysis speeds up incident resolution. Lastly, the CMDB guarantees changes are tightly controlled and managed and delivers full audit control through baselining and versioning.

By delivering the change and configuration controls IT needs to ensure the optimal availability of core business services, the CMDB improves the full range of operational tasks associated with change, incident, problem and other ITIL best practice processes. It enables ITIL processes, reduces operational risks and helps organisations ensure IT alignment to critical business services.

Achieving successful ITSM

The primary goal of ITSM is to provide quality IT services in support of the business. Accomplishing this requires a thorough understanding of the IT infrastructure including the CIs that make up the infrastructure, the relationships between the CIs, and the relationships between CIs and the services delivered to the business.

The CMDB assures business service performance and service availability, provides the foundation for configuration and change management, reduces the operational costs of service management and improves regulatory compliance by supporting critical business processes. By capturing and managing IT relationships, the CMDB provides organisations with the ability to enable configuration management and other critical ITIL processes to achieve a successful ITSM strategy.

ITIL is a registered trademark and a registered community trademark of the UK Office of Government and Commerce (OGC).