Deliver a CMDB with true business value:

6 essential steps

1
Introduction
Your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) provides accurate and reliable information
about digital services and the infrastructure that supports them. But it has little or no value if it
is just a master data repository. To create value, you have to do something useful with the data.
That’s why a CMDB is a critical tool for maintaining high service availability.

Impact of an unhealthy CMDB

An unhealthy CMDB can be detrimental to your organization. Let’s look at a common scenario:
a service outage. An application isn’t responding, and hundreds of users are affected. How do
you figure out what’s wrong and get the service back up and running quickly? Has someone
upgraded the application recently? Is it the server, or is there a problem with a database
halfway around the world? Is there a network problem? So many possibilities, and so little
time. Without a CMDB, you don’t even know the application version, which server it’s running
on, or which databases it’s talking to. You spend hours gathering information—assuming that
you can find it—and meanwhile the clock is ticking.

Sources of statistics
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/01/brand-reputation-value-leadership-managing-ethisphere.html
http://www.evolven.com/blog/downtime-outages-and-failures-understanding-their-true-costs.html
http://www.nasi.com/downtime_cost.php
MII-830B White Paper: Institute of Configuration Management (icmhq.com), “Monetary Value of Traditional Configuration
Management versus CMII,” Revision B, January 14, 2014, used with permission

2
Benefits of a healthy CMDB
A healthy CMDB, on the other hand, helps you to:

• P
 revent business service outages, especially those caused by unplanned changes
and misconfiguration

• D
 iagnose and fix costly service outages faster with instant access to the information such as
infrastructure relationships, service topologies, change histories and software versions

• Reduce service delivery costs

• Maximize the ROI of your application portfolio

• Accelerate time-to-market for new services

A healthy CMDB doesn’t just happen. Every successful CMDB deployment needs a detailed
Configuration Management Plan. When you clearly identify your objectives and develop a
comprehensive strategy for attaining and sustaining these capabilities, you lay the foundation
for better business service health. In this ebook, we take you through the some of the common
practices for creating and maintaining a healthy CMDB. Follow this guidance, and you’ll be on
the road to a great CMDB and improved business service health.

3
Six steps to a healthy CMDB
Here are six key steps to a successful CMDB deployment. These steps aren’t necessarily
linear—you’ll want to optimize your approach to meet your organization’s unique needs.
However, you need to address all of these to maximize the benefits of your CMDB.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6

Identify areas Set your Build a team Design your Operationalize Create
of business direction and governance configuration configuration ongoing strategic
value model data model management alignment

Follow these steps, and you’ll dramatically improve service health. You’ll also be able to:

• Understand the organizational value of each of your business services

• Know who uses your business services and predict future consumption
• Identify where to invest and where to scale back
• Track your service delivery costs and find out how to optimize them
• Reduce technical debt and risk by seeing which technologies underpin your services

Let’s examine each of these steps in more detail.

4
Step 1: Identify areas where your CMDB can
deliver business value
A CMDB delivers business value, so it needs to support both the strategic objectives of your
business as a whole and the tactical goals of your IT organization. This means focusing on
the things that matter to your business. Many organizations struggle with the right amount of
configuration management. Often, they try to take an all-encompassing approach. Inevitably, this
turns out to be too expensive and time-consuming—no one is willing to spend millions and wait
years for a result. Too little configuration management is just as bad. Without sufficient information,
you’re unable to properly support your business needs and deliver meaningful improvements. Your
CMDB will end up being regarded as an expensive and worthless white elephant.

To determine right amount of configuration management, engage with business stakeholders

to identify areas where your CMDB can make a significant difference. Look for opportunities to
improve productivity, reduce costs, or increase employee satisfaction—these areas of focus
usually get the greatest business traction.

For example, are you being hit with big penalties for software license non-compliance? Or are
you having too many service outages? If so, which services are affected and what’s the impact
on productivity? Are your employees fed up because their issues are bouncing around between
IT support teams? Perhaps you’re starting a cloud migration and need to know which services to
move first—and how to move them. This isn’t a comprehensive list; you’ll find your own opportunities
and challenges that you can address with your CMDB.

Don’t spend a huge amount of time identifying every possible opportunity. Come up with a list of
the biggest opportunities and prioritize it. Things to consider when prioritizing include:

• Quantified benefits—for example, how much money will you save?

• Amount of effort—what’s the return on investment and do you have the resources?

• Timeline—will this deliver a quick win for your business?

• Risk—how complex is it, what could go wrong, and what are the unknowns?

• Support from the business—is someone asking for this and are they willing to go to bat for it?

5
Step 2: Set your direction
Great configuration management starts with clear goals, actionable objectives, and measurable
business outcomes.

Write well-defined goals and objectives

Companies with successful CMDB deployments always articulate what they want to accomplish.
They document their approach, determine their desired business outcomes, and identify how they
will measure results.

When you're setting goals and objectives, ask yourself the following questions:

What What do you want to accomplish?

How What is your approach, and what are your constraints and assumptions?

What business outcomes will your

Why
CMDB support?

Measure How do you know that you’re on track?

This document gives you examples of how to effectively set goals and objectives.

6
Identify strategic company and IT initiatives
Your CMDB needs to support your business and IT strategy. Start by identifying your company’s
key initiatives. These might include things such as:

• Digital transformation

• Business growth through acquisition

• Expanding your customer base

• Moving to subscription-based product licensing

Don’t forget to include strategic initiatives within your IT department, such as:

• Aligning IT with the business

• Adopting a cloud-first strategy

• Enhancing information security

• Automation and machine learning

• Implementing blockchain

Expert tip:
When describing strategic business initiatives, use the same language that
your company already uses. Your stakeholders will understand more quickly,
and you'll get faster buy-in.

7
Define a set of supporting use cases
Write down a list of use cases that support these strategic initiatives. Here are some examples:

How does this tie back to the

Strategic initiative Use case
CMDB?

Align IT with the business An IT component breaks. How Create an accurate, up-
do we know if this affects one to-date view of which
of our mission-critical business infrastructure components
services? support each of your critical
business services

Expand customer base We want to add new interactive Track website infrastructure and
services to our existing applications to provide input
customer website. How do for performance optimization
we make sure our website will and enterprise architecture
continue to scale? evolution

Improve information security We need to ensure PCI DSS Add CI attributes to indicate
compliance. Which parts of our which IT components store or
infrastructure do we need to have access to customer credit
protect and audit? card information

Cloud-first strategy We are going to migrate our Identify all of the inventory
inventory control system to control system components
the cloud. How do we plan this that need to be migrated by
migration? creating a service map.

Note that while we've just given one sample use case per initiative, you will probably have
multiple use cases for each.

8
Step 3: Build a team and a governance model
Now that you have set your direction, it’s time to build your governance structure and configuration
management team.

Creating governance
If you’re part of a large organization, you might want to set up a Configuration Control Board
(CCB). This is a steering committee that oversees your configuration management program,
making sure that it delivers value, stays on track, and operates effectively.

Voting members of your CCB should be team leaders who are directly accountable for strategic
IT initiatives while being close enough to support teams to understand day-to-day operations.

Make sure that you formally structure your CCB meetings. Publish a meeting agenda, record and
track action items, and issue minutes. Not only does this increase the effectiveness of your CCB,
it also provides evidence to senior leadership of the value your CCB is delivering.

This CCB Charter document is an example of how our customers implement governance through
a CCB.

Creating a CCB does promote success, but it’s a significant undertaking that is, quite frankly,
better suited to organizations with mature and extensive configuration management processes.
If you’re just starting out on your journey, creating a CCB may be too big a hurdle—and many IT
organizations never create a CCB at all.

9
Building your configuration management team
Here are three key ways to make your configuration management team a success:

• Get early buy-in from executives. This creates credibility and trust, giving your team the support it
needs to drive change. If you can articulate how your CMDB will support the strategic goals and
objectives of your executives, you are much more likely to get their support. That’s another reason
why setting your direction – see Step 2 – is so important.

• Make sure that your team members are free to focus on their configuration management
responsibilities, rather than being bogged down in daily “keep the lights on” support.

• Clearly define, document, and communicate each team member’s role and responsibilities.
This ensures ownership, accountability, and authority.

Defining roles and responsibilities

Here’s a typical example of how a ServiceNow customer defined the roles and responsibilities of its
configuration management team. Note that these roles cover both the CCB and operational teams.

Role Responsibility Title

CM Executive Oversees configuration Senior executive

Sponsor plan implementation in all
departments across the
CCB process owner
company.

Configuration Manages delivery of CM services Senior IT manager

Manager and documentation of operating
procedures.
CCB chair

CM System Analyst Performs daily CM tasks with IT analyst

minimal supervision

CM Specialist Performs daily CM tasks with IT admin

direction from CM system analyst

To find out more about these roles, please read this detailed guide.

10
Distributing processes among the team
Do you want a central team to handle everything, or do you plan on having individual teams? For
example, will your storage team look after their own configuration management? Or do you want a
hybrid model, with distributed teams feeding into a central team? Here are some things to consider
before making this decision:

• If you have a centralized team, you’re still going to have to engage many subject matter experts.
This is particularly true if you are dealing with on-premises infrastructure and plan to populate
your CMDB manually (as opposed to auto-mating discovery with ITOM Visibility). This requires
strong project buy-in from your stakeholders and heavy project management. Even if you do
automatically discover your infrastructure, you’ll still need to engage subject matter experts to
validate that the deployed infrastructure matches the intended design.

• D
 istributed teams do have advantages. With a number of small, distributed teams, each team
can make quick decisions and take responsibility for resolving issues. And, because each team is
also a CMDB client—they use the CMDB data—they are best positioned to prioritize what data
goes into the CMDB. And, if you are using discovery, the burden on these teams can be quite light
since the CMDB is updated automatically.

• M
 any ServiceNow customers opt for a hybrid model. Even with discovery, distributed teams often
don’t have all the expertise needed to maintain their slice of the CMDB. For example, functions
such as security span your entire IT infrastructure—and it’s unrealistic to expect each team to have
its own security expert. The same thing goes for monitoring, software asset management, and
many other functions that depend on the CMDB. A hybrid model that combines centralized core
competencies with the domain expertise of distributed teams often provides the best balance,
and it also ensures process consistency and uniform governance.

11
Step 4: Design your configuration data model
Now, it’s time to decide what data you are going to keep in your CMDB. You do this by defining
which CI classes you need.

Before you start, familiarize yourself with the capabilities and design options for the CMDB.

Start simply and grow gradually

It’s a mistake to try to build a comprehensive CMDB right away. Start simply and then make
incremental improvements as your configuration management capabilities mature. Decide which
CI classes and attributes you need to support the data needs of the use cases you identified in
Step 2. If you find yourself defining CI classes or attributes that aren’t needed for these use cases,
you’re off track.

For example, if you need to include storage in your CMDB, you might start off with CIs for physical
storage arrays. The next step could be to add file systems, and then logical unit numbers (LUNs)
after that. By taking this approach, you can launch basic capabilities quickly, and then introduce
additional CI classes over time as you grow your capabilities and scope.

12
Leverage out-of-the-box CI classes
We highly recommend starting with the standard CI classes included with the ServiceNow CMDB.
These are designed to support a wide range of common use cases, and you can use out-of-the-
box ServiceNow Discovery capabilities to populate these CIs in your CMDB (more on that later).

Most ServiceNow customers start the CI classes they need to support incident and change
management. These CIs typically represent IT components such as:

• Servers and virtual machines

• Storage arrays
• Databases
• Applications
• Network equipment
• Load balancers
• Security appliances
You can also extend out-of-the-box classes, creating new classes with additional attributes.
ServiceNow's CI Class Manager provides a wizard-style interface that helps you to do this.

You may come across cases where out-of-the-box CIs aren’t sufficient—for instance, if you have a
custom application or want to enrich CIs with data from third-party sources. In this case, you have
two options: create a new CI class or subclass an existing out-of-the-box CI class. In general, the
latter approach is preferred because you can still manage the new CI class at the superclass level.

Warning:
Make sure that you use CIs correctly. By definition, a CI is something that can
change–so there’s no point in creating CIs for things that never change. Also,
a CI must have a unique nomenclature that remains constant.

13
Step 5: Operationalize configuration
management
Now that you have your configuration data model, it’s time to think about getting your CMDB up
and running. However, creating a healthy CMDB isn’t a one-time activity. To maintain a healthy
CMDB, you need to put processes and tools in place to keep your CMDB up to date and accurate–
and you need to document these in your Configuration Management Plan. Otherwise, your CMDB
will fall into disrepair, and all of your hard work will be lost.

Think about questions such as:

• What information–for example, operational status–do stakeholders need for each CI?

• How do you ensure that this information is clear, concise, and valid?

• Which CIs can you keep up to date automatically?

• Which CIs have to be updated manually, and who is responsible for this?

• How do you control changes in your CMDB?

• How do you monitor the health of your CMDB?

14
 Discover your IT infrastructure
Expert tip:
While you can add all your CIs to your CMDB manually, this will take a long time, and it’s very hard
Make sure that identification rules
to keep your CMDB up to date as your IT environment changes. The good news is that you can use
are properly defined so your CMDB
ServiceNow Discovery to automatically populate your CMDB. Discovery will find all of the network
doesn’t have any duplicate CIs.
infrastructure, servers, applications, and other components in your IT environment and create
Duplicate CIs will create confusion,
corresponding CIs. This includes discovering public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon AWS
lead to duplicated work, and
and Microsoft Azure.
adversely affect your operational
processes. They can also result in a When your IT environment changes, Discovery can update your CMDB automatically. This means
loss of traceability, which can lead that you always have an accurate, up-to-date infrastructure view–which is a critical foundation of
to audit issues. a healthy CMDB.

Discover your business services

Just discovering your IT infrastructure isn’t enough. To provide high-performing business services,
you need to know how these services are delivered. For instance, which applications are part of the
business service, which servers do they run on, how do the different parts communicate, and which
web servers and load balancers support the service?

Again, you could figure this out manually, creating service maps that document the topology of
each of your business services. Unfortunately, this is a considerable undertaking, and it’s almost
impossible to keep these maps up to date once you have created them.

Instead, use ServiceNow Service Mapping to create business service maps. Start by identifying
your most critical business services and map these first. For each service, Service Mapping will
work its way through your infrastructure, identifying all of the CIs that support the service and
how they are related. It stores these relationships in your CMDB and automatically updates
them if they change.

15
Only with Confidently integrate third-party data with Service Graph Connectors

Multisource CMDB Getting value from a CMDB starts with quality data. And you rely on third-party data from multiple
sources, such discovery, monitoring, vulnerability, and configuration tools. This data powers many
can you have of your digital service lifecycle processes—everything from application portfolio rationalization,
DevOps pipeline automation, and autonomous cloud operations through to risk assessment and
mitigation, service ROI assessment, and security operations.

To effectively support these processes, this third-party data must be up to date, accurate, and
consistent — creating a rock-solid underpinning for end-to-end digital service delivery. That’s why

» ServiceNow offers Service Graph Connectors that deliver certified third-party data integrations.
Service Graph Connectors allow you to quickly and easily load large volumes of third-party data
into Service Graph or your existing CMDB, ensuring data quality, timeliness, and consistency. These
integration tools also ensure that third-party data is mapped to the right locations in the CMDB,
Complete, Automate complex which allows ServiceNow apps to use the data out of the box and increases reporting accuracy.
clean data technical stack Learn more about Service Graph Connectors in this datasheet.

Unlock CMDB super powers with Multisource CMDB

With complex technical stacks to manage and multiple data sources to populate the CMDB, you
use Reconciliation Rules to create a “golden CI” from the best source for each attribute. But the
alternate values for those attributes aren’t retained – or if they are, they’re captured in redundant,
non-standard fields. This is a “choose the best, drop the rest” scenario. Ideally, you should compare
the same attributes from different data sources, or even look for data gaps across data sources —
which is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Multisource CMDB from ServiceNow allows you to create that “golden CI” while also maintaining the
alternate values from other data sources. That means you can “choose the best and keep the rest.”
With Multisource CMDB, you can compare differences in attributes from all discovery sources, then
update reconciliation rules and recompute the “golden CIs” in real time. The result is complete, clean
CMDB data that unlocks true automation across their entire tech stack

16
Implement a Service Graph and the Common Service Data Model
Service Graph is ServiceNow’s next-generation system of record. Historically, the CMDB has
focused on managing infrastructure, assets, and their relationships. However, ServiceNow
customers now want a consistent, data-driven approach to managing the entire digital lifecycle,
including planning, application development, deployment, performance, cost, business processes,
and other areas.

Service Graph provides this by implementing the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), a
comprehensive data model that covers the complete digital lifecycle. You can think of the
CSDM as Service Graph’s data schema, in the same way that the CMDB has a data schema.
CSDM creates a standard blueprint for automated and integrated IT services. With streamlined
supporting activities and value streams fully integrated on the Now Platform, you can realize full-
value chain alignment, improved quality, transparency, better insights, automation, and lower cost.

Here’s the good news. Service Graph is an evolution of the CMDB. Both Service Graph and the
CSDM are backwards compatible with the CMDB, so none of your CMDB investment will be lost. In
fact, as Service Graph continues to evolve, it will make your CMDB easier to manage and give you
powerful new capabilities.

Service Graph and the CSDM also provide enhanced data governance—prescriptive guidance
on how to populate data in Service Graph. Even if you’re not planning to use the full capabilities
of Service Graph today, we strongly recommend that you follow this same guidance when
implementing your CMDB. This will reduce risk and improve the quality of your CMDB, and it will
also position you to take full advantage of Service Graph in future. Learn more about the CSDM
in this executive brief.

17
 Populate and maintain non-discoverable information
A small percentage CIs and attributes are not discoverable– usually less than 5%. For example,
some CI attributes provide business-related information such as who owns a CI–or the criticality
of a business service. Clearly, these types of attributes can’t be discovered.

You will need to populate and maintain these CIs and attributes manually. However, it’s a mistake to
try to do this by yourself.

Instead, identify corresponding business process owners and make them responsible for updating
information. For example, if someone owns your server infrastructure, make them responsible for
updating and periodically validating non-discoverable server attributes. Similarly, if someone
owns a particular business service–for example, your warehouse management system–have them
update and validate the attributes of that business service CI.

You will also want to periodically audit this non-discoverable information in your CMDB. There are
two types of formal audits– functional and physical–that organizations typically perform on a
regular basis.

Manage and control change

Effective change management is critical for a healthy CMDB. Uncontrolled change creates risks,
breaks configuration management processes, and creates an unreliable CMDB. For example, if
someone incorrectly marks a server as out-of-service, this could ultimately lead to a service outage.

Expert tip: To avoid this, do the following:

We strongly recommend that
• Use ServiceNow Change Management to handle change requests
you use ServiceNow Change
Management’s Proposed Change • Ensure that changes are reviewed and approved before they are made
function to manage updates of
non-discoverable attributes. • Configure permissions so that only authorized users can make changes to your CMDB

• Communicate changes to stakeholder

18
Monitor the health of your CMDB
Once you have the tools and processes in place for a healthy CMDB, you need to keep it
healthy and resolve issues as they arise. The best way to do this is to monitor your CMDB using
the ServiceNow CMDB dashboard. Using the dashboard, you can monitor key CMDB health
KPIs, including:

• Completeness–scorecard of CIs with unpopulated mandatory or recommended attributes

• Correctness–scorecard of orphaned, duplicate, and stale CIs

• Compliance–scorecard of the results of CI audits

In addition to aggregate scorecards, you can also drill into CMDB health details for specific
business services, groups of CIs, and individual CIs. This allows you to pinpoint CMDB health
problems and request corrective action–for example, by following up with corresponding CI
owners or business service owners when CIs become stale (i.e. haven’t been updated recently).

Gain insights into the key foundational indicators of your CMDB

and CSDM
The ServiceNow Data Foundations Dashboards provide recommendations to ensure that you get
the most out of your CMDB and CSDM. The dashboards are available for free as a single app via
the ServiceNow store. The CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard optimizes CMDB configurations
and customizations as well as highlights implementation risks. The CSDM Data Foundations
Dashboard shows you if you’re realizing the full benefit of the CSDM; for example, you may
see that some of your business service offerings don't have the required relationship to an
application service.

The CMDB Health Dashboards and Data Foundations Dashboards complement each other. The
CMDB Health Dashboards provide insights into the entire CMDB and allow you to configure areas
of focus. The Data Foundations Dashboards are prescriptive with a smaller scope, focused on the
areas ServiceNow knows are foundational and critical to get right

19
Step 6: Create ongoing alignment
A Configuration Management Plan is a living document. Your business isn’t standing still, and
neither can you. You need to stay aligned with business strategy and respond to new business
initiatives. Effective two-way communication with business stakeholders is critical so that you
understand their needs and they understand how you plan to support these.

Leverage your Configuration Control Board to drive this alignment. This is where you can prioritize
and evolve your configuration management roadmap to maximize the benefits for your business.
By providing leadership and managerial oversight, your CCB should create a forum for effective
decision-making–turning the discipline of configuration management into a high-value asset for
your business.

Also, tailor your configuration management plan to align with major projects. Assign a
configuration management team resource to each strategic project, so they understand how it
impacts configuration management. For example, think about the first project in your business that
uses containers. The last thing you want is a request for new CI classes two days before go-live.

20
Let’s recap
Your business depends on you to deliver high-quality business services. To do this, you need a
healthy CMDB supported by good configuration management processes. With a healthy CMDB,
you can:

• Prevent business service outages

• Identify and respond to service outages more quickly

• Diagnose and fix service outages faster

Achieving and maintaining a healthy CMDB isn’t magic. Follow the six steps in this guide and you’ll
lay the foundation for a successful CMDB deployment.

And, you’ll enjoy the payoff: dramatically better business service health.

Get extensive CMDB design guidance in our latest guide.

21
Your journey doesn't end here!
Visit the Customer Success Center to learn even more about how you can get the most from
ServiceNow.

Learn More

About ServiceNow
ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is the fastest-growing enterprise cloud software company in the
world above $1 billion. Founded in 2004 with the goal of making work easier for people,
ServiceNow is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform
and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity
for more than 6,200 enterprise customers worldwide, including approximately 80% of the
Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.servicenow.com.

Copyright 2021 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and / or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and / or other countries. Other company and
product manes may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

SN-EB-6 Steps to Healthy CMDB-042021