BUSINESS VALUE OF SERVICE ASSET AND CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT www.wendia.com Information Technology Challenges that a service disruption is eliminated and service restored as soon as possible via Incident Management, Information Technology plays a key role, and or you can enable your enterprise with new capabilities maintaining the IT infrastructure is quite important to via the Change Management process”. In fact, both are any business. IT infrastructure is becoming more and correct. more complex, and is in constant progress. Especially when it comes to hardware, software, virtual machines, In Wendia, we believe that it does not matter which cloud facilities, mobile devices, and Internet of Things. process has the priority, but the necessity of building a robust CMDB cannot be overlooked in any successful For a proper management of any IT infrastructure, you ITIL implementation project. need to build a proper CMDB, i.e. you need to enter configuration items in a centralized CMDB. Issues you We have experience with both implementation may have to resolve in this process include unknown methods, but we believe that you cannot gain the CIs, inadequate quality of CI data, and incorrect real value of other processes without having a proper number of relations between your CIs. CMDB. For instance, having Incident Management without having a CMDB in place, would result in So, building a proper CMDB takes a lot of effort, and as something like an issue tracking mechanism which different implementation experiences show, most efforts for sure is not what you are looking for after an ITSM are time consuming and complex, and many have implementation. failed. Which ITIL Process to Implement First?! IT Value of SACM As mentioned before, you cannot gain real value of the This is a difficult question to answer. ITIL is mostly ITIL processes without a CMDB. Processes which are about Configuration Items; When an incident occurs, a not fully implemented without a CMDB include: CI is affected, you run change management process to make a change to your configuration items; Availability • Financial Management of IT Services of services is calculated based on its supporting • Availability Management configuration items, etc. So, maybe you would choose • IT Service Continuity Management to start your implementation project with the Service • Change Management Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) • Release & Deployment Management process? • Incident Management • Problem Management Many experts believe that the To understand why, we return to ITIL; If you had a implementation mechanism to record incidents, and their related of IT Service assets, you could have used this for a great analysis Management like Component Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA), so you should start with could find out what may happen, if a specific incident building a CMDB occurs on a specific asset. As another example, you and continuously should keep necessary information about each CI, improving that, so that you can manage your changes efficiently on because the CMDB your assets and understand which changes are not lies at the complete core of most processes. For authorized, which changes should be handled using instance, the Change Management process is pointless the standard change process, or which again should without SACM; You will be asked questions like: You be referred to CAB, etc. Or if you consider the relation are making the change on what? Without a CMDB? You between CIs in a CMDB, you will find out that a change are recording an incident, for what? On which asset? and the affect of it cannot be handled seriously if relations are not defined properly. Or in a complex Other experts believe that Service Asset and environment when an incident is affecting a user’s Configuration Management alone does not bring any service, you cannot find the root cause of the incident specific value to the business. They talk about the value without a relational CMDB. of other processes, like: “It is important to the business www.wendia.com Another thing is that availability of data in the time In other words, improvements in the Service Asset required is necessary for the service desk staff so they and Configuration Management process, bring can take proper action against each service outage. improvements in the IT processes, and afterwards You also can use the Service Asset and Configuration your IT service quality increases and brings value to Management process itself, to monitor the costs and the transactions of your enterprise. In fact, SACM the budget you allocate to your IT assets. You will be can have direct affect on your business as a whole! using Service Asset and Configuration Management Why? Because measuring the value of an IT Service to monitor assets other than physical ones, like Virtual or Business Service, cannot be accomplished Machines, Software, Contracts, Processes, People, etc. without measuring the value of its components. Wendia’s POB has a multi-dimensional CMDB in which And for calculating this, you should have not only you can record data and their relations according to all your components, but also the relations between your technical and non-technical requirements like the components. That is what is necessary for the security of relations between CIs. Furthermore, you can calculation of the value of your services; And this is all make your data secure according to the attributes you about CMDB! maintain for each record, and you can mark data as confidential based on your business rules. In Wendia, we aim to help our customers increase the success rate of their Enterprise Service Business Value of Service Asset & Management implementations. Configuration Management To understand the real value of Service Asset and If you would like to have more information about Configuration Management for your business, let Service Asset and Configuration Management or us take a look at how value is added to a business’ Service Management in general, and how POB can transactions, which is really what is most important for help you to optimize your Enterprise Processes a service provider. Management, please contact your local Wendia office or partner or reach us at [email protected]. From the pyramid you can see that: • The value of a transaction is supported by business services • Business services are supported by IT services • IT services are supported by IT processes • IT processes are mostly supported by SACM www.wendia.com.