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Developing the Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB

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Developing the Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB Developing the Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB [email protected] 571.262.0980 Table of Contents I. Executive Summary .......................................................................2 II. Change Management Control as a Basis for CMDB ..................... 4 A. It’s All About Change ..................................................................... 4 B. Is Root Cause Analysis Actually Effective? ........................................ 4 C. CMDB: A Means to an End .............................................................. 5 III. Today’s Market Value of the CMDB ............................................ 7 IV. Business Drivers of ITIL Change and the CMDB ......................... 8 V. Developing a Strategy for the CMDB ......................................... 11 A. Is a CMDB an Asset Management Database? ................................. 11 B. Developing the Configuration Management Processes ..................... 11 C. Beginning to Develop the CMDB Strategy ...................................... 12 VI. Developing Business Value for Change, Release and Configuration Management ........................................................... 17 A. Change and Release Management ................................................ 17 B. Business Process Re-engineering .................................................. 17 C. Change Management Lifecycle Improvements ................................ 18 D. Configuration Management .......................................................... 22 E. Calculating Gains on Change, Release and Configuration Management .............................................................. 23 VII. Developing the Business Case for a CMDB ............................. 26 VIII. Appendices ............................................................................. 28 A. Appendix 1 - Roles and Responsibilities ......................................... 28 B. Appendix 2 – Skill Set .................................................................. 30 C. Appendix 3 – Current CMDB Vendors ............................................ 34 Developing the Business Case for Change, Configuration Management and CMDB A Step-by-step Guide to Developing the Business Value for Change and Configuration Management I. Executive Summary As enterprises and their IT support organizations grow, their infrastructures become increasingly fragmented and spread across a variety of functions, technologies and organizations. As this IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ continues, efficiency, optimization and overall control over IT resources suffers. In large and busy enterprises (500 plus changes monthly), organizations often address the IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ issue with automated or, in some cases manual, Change ‘root cause’ analysis tools. However, spreadsheets and manually maintained asset and specific purpose configuration repositories cannot sufficiently take into account the inter-relationships of CIs and fall far short of effective root cause analysis for complex IT infrastructures. Root cause analysis, then, not supported by an accurate CMDB database and automated business rules that address complex inter-relationship of CIs can be labor-intensive, as well as ineffective. However, justifying, developing and implementing a CMDB is not an isolated activity, a technology implementation or a database development effort. A CMDB is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and the end(s) are increased Change Management and control and increased Configuration and Release Management control. A strategy for CMDB deployment, then, must be developed, the goal of which is to identify and define Configuration Items (CIs) and their relationships; record and report the status of CIs and their related Incidents, Problems and Requests for Change (RFC); and verify the completeness and correctness of CIs. The strategy should include: Best practice literature review Vendor literature review Functional attributes critical to the implementation of your CMDB An assessment of the current maturity of your organization in relation to Configuration Management A ‘model’ reflecting the desired ‘end state’ of your organization in relation to Configuration Management 2 CMDB processes must also be developed addressing planning, verification and audit, identification, control, status accounting and reporting on the Configuration Management process. These processes should take into account ITIL Change Management and ITIL Configuration Management best practices. The business value of an improved Change and Configuration Management process and a CMDB must be developed and documented for use in a business case. Templates can be used to collect data that will assist in the quantification of: Business process re-engineering Change Management lifecycle improvements Change Management approval board activities Change and Configuration Management executions Metrics to support and make the case for improved Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB The business case should address: Change Management as a Basis for the CMDB Today’s Market Value of the CMDB Business Drivers of the CMDB Development of a Strategy for the CMDB Development of the Business Value of the CMDB Development of the Business Case for a CMDB Ultimately the CMDB should be profiled as a crucial tool to the improvement of Service Level Management and an important underpinning to an accurate and effective Asset Management system. For more detailed information on implementing your CMDB, download Evergreen’s guide to the implementation of a CMDB, ‘Nine Steps to the Implementation of an Effective CMDB’ at the link below: www.evergreensys.com/downloads/cmdb/ 3 II. Change Management Control as a Basis for CMDB IDC’s January 2007 benchmarking study on CMDB and Change Management deployments claims that the CMDB is all about Change. States Stephen Eliot, research manager for Enterprise Systems’ Management Software Service: “8% of enterprise IT organizations have deployed a CMDB. However, over the next three years, 70% of enterprise IT organizations will consider deploying a CMDB. On average, these organizations make 528 configuration changes a month, which causes an increase in complexity and a high rate of IT service failures. CMDBs are helping and will help IT organizations get infrastructure change under control”. 1 A. It’s All About Change So the business value of a CMDB is all about Change Control? True or False? The answer is “YES” and “YES”. As enterprises and their IT support organizations grow, their infrastructures become increasingly fragmented and spread across a variety of functions, technologies and organizations. It becomes more and more difficult for IT to gain and maintain control over every Configuration Item (CI) encompassed by the infrastructure. Even an asset management database only archives IT’s assets and documents the CI locations, without exerting any control over them. As this IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ continues, efficiency, optimization and overall control over IT resources suffers. In Evergreen’s Q2 2006 survey on Change Management, 67% of respondents rated service quality as the top driver for Change Management, yet 40% reported greater than 26% of changes were short-term and emergency and 44% reported using an informal risk management process for Change Management. So service drives change, yet change processes still tend to be reactive.2 Change process and CMDB are ‘partners’ in executing the work of IT efficiently and accurately. At the highest level, change is the workflow of IT and the CMDB is the information store that provides data to support the decision-making process. This partnership is the functionality that drives an efficient change flow engine. As realization of the importance of the value of Change Management evolves in large enterprises, organizations are beginning to ‘connect the dots’ regarding the relationship of Change Management to CMDB. Despite this fact, many companies are not doing the analytic work to get the real business value from the effort. B. Is Root Cause Analysis Actually Effective? In large and busy enterprises (500 plus changes monthly), organizations often address the IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ issue with automated or, in some cases manual, Change ‘root cause’ analysis tools. These tools analyze changes, in many case failed changes, to get at the ‘root cause’ of the problem. 1 CMDB Deployments and Change Management: Efficiency Benchmarks for IT Organizations, IDC, January 29, 2007 2 Survey on Enterprise Change Management Maturity, Evergreen Systems, June 2006 4 Root cause analysis is critical to the improvement of change control, but without that analysis in the context of all configuration items (CIs) and their inter- relationships, such analysis can be reactive, incomplete and in some cases, downright ineffective. Spreadsheets and manually maintained asset and specific purpose configuration repositories cannot sufficiently take into account the inter- relationships of CIs and fall far short of effective root cause analysis for complex IT infrastructures. Root cause analysis, then, not supported by an accurate CMDB database and automated business rules that address complex inter-relationship of CIs can be labor-intensive, as well as ineffective. C. CMDB: A Means to an End However, justifying, developing and implementing a CMDB is not an isolated activity, a technology implementation or a database development effort. A CMDB is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And the
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