Create a Configuration Management Roadmap

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• ITIL’s version of configuration management will be too expensive and costly for most small or medium-sized organizations to implement.
• Without proper scoping and planning, organizations risk wasting time and resources procuring and maintaining an overly complex system.
• You do not need a system to record and monitor every asset in your environment in order to reap the benefits of configuration management. You just need to consider what your CMDB will accomplish before you invest.
• Configuration management, executed with a CMDB, is an enabling process. You cannot build or purchase a CMDB until you know which processes it will be supporting.
• If you do not gather the necessary requirements up front, you risk deploying a CMDB that is not useful to the people and processes who should benefit from it.

Impact and Result

• Gather comprehensive stakeholder requirements in order to accurately define the organization’s configuration management objectives and identify the IT processes that will be redesigned to integrate with a CMDB.
• Choose an appropriate technology target state. Configuration management can be achieved with a homegrown spreadsheet or vendor solution; the choice of solution will be driven largely by the complexity of your current environment and the availability of resources.
• Estimate the cost and benefit of re-designing the processes identified during the requirements gathering stage and prioritize them accordingly.
• Create a complete roadmap of initiatives that can be presented to stakeholders to obtain buy-in for selecting and implementing a CMDB and formal configuration management process.