The IT Infrastructure Library, ITIL, framework for service management best practice is a set of procedures that covers various aspects of IT servce delivery from development, through systems management, availability, and maintenance, to the support of the system through helpdesk and service centers.
Organizations have bought into the idea of business service management, and the messages fostered by ITIL have really caught on, said Jim White of Managed Objects, the business service management company which sponsored the survey.
The ITIL approach fosters an approach to IT service management that is largely based on the development of an understanding between business and IT elements. It relies on the construction of a configuration management database, CMDB, as a repository of asset and service data. We found that while organizations find the concept of the CMDB appealing and the benefits are self evident, there are wide variations when it comes to how they should be constructed, White said. While the notion of the CMDB is true to ITIL, it is often loosely interpreted when it comes to the build and implementation phase.
According to the survey findings, most CMDBs are updated infrequently, with 48% of respondents saying they update the CMDB monthly or even less frequently, and only 21% updating their information either daily or in real time.
An accurate and valid CMDB is essential if IT is to move from simple silo-based management to more complex business-oriented services management. Analyst houses and software vendors like Managed Objects are pushing the idea of a federated CMDB or virtual Configuration Management Data Base as a means of reducing the complexity of deployment. Systems that automate topology discovery are considered another means of accelerating the CMDB build.
To that end, Managed Objects has struck an OEM agreement with nLayers Inc, developer of the InSight infrastructure auto-discovery appliance that builds a map of n-tiered enterprise environments.
The software provides the Managed Objects system with an automatic discovery capability that helps it identify all interdependencies across application, IT system, and network tiers. It is agentless and passive, which means it is very scalable and will detect changes in status of a service over time. Although the Managed Objects CMDB has no in-built query features, it does produce highly actionable information, White claimed.
Mapping IT relationships and dependencies is a manually intensive process, and only 33% of respondents reported using software to map relationships between elements in the IT infrastructure.
