What are the best practices for defining and maintaining configuration items (CIs) in ServiceNow?

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ServiceNow Configuration Management is a key process in IT Service Management (ITSM) that helps you track and control the assets and services in your IT environment. Configuration items (CIs) are the building blocks of your configuration management database (CMDB), which stores information about the relationships and dependencies among CIs. In this article, you will learn some best practices for defining and maintaining CIs in ServiceNow, such as:

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Nitesh Narula

Manager - IT Change & Configuration ( cmdb) @ Gartner
Sumukh Bharadwaj - ITIL Master and Ambassador

Manager - Service Delivery | Leading a high performing team, managing mission-critical, multi-million-dollar customer…
Christopher Yen

IT Service Management - ITIL v4

1 Identify your CIs

The first step in configuration management is to identify what CIs you need to manage and how they relate to each other. CIs can be anything that has a configuration, such as hardware, software, network devices, documents, or people. You should define the scope, attributes, and classification of your CIs based on your business needs and objectives. For example, you may want to group CIs by type, function, location, owner, or status.

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Ghangesh G.
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Configuration Item are any elements that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service or support the services. They can be Infrastructure items, Applications, Business Services encasing grouped services delivered to support the business goal.

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2 Populate your CMDB

Once you have identified your CIs, you need to populate your CMDB with accurate and up-to-date data. You can use various methods to collect and import data into your CMDB, such as discovery, integration, manual entry, or import from external sources. You should also define the data quality and governance rules for your CMDB, such as validation, verification, reconciliation, and audit. These rules will help you ensure the consistency and reliability of your CMDB data.

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Christopher Yen

IT Service Management - ITIL v4
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Sometimes it helps to work backwards a little and think about the lifecycle and how the data is going to stay updated. Oftentimes in CMDB implementations stakeholders want to add everything under the sun that they have some spreadsheet for, but if it's not useful and there is not automation/workforce/procedure to keep the data updated it's going to degrade the reputation of the data in the CMDB. You want users of the CMDB to be confident the data is reliable and if they see stale data everywhere it's going to go against that.

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3 Manage your CI lifecycle

CIs are not static; they change over time due to incidents, changes, releases, or other events. You need to manage the lifecycle of your CIs, from creation to retirement, and update your CMDB accordingly. You can use ServiceNow workflows, notifications, approvals, and automation to streamline and automate the CI lifecycle management. You should also monitor and report on the performance, availability, and health of your CIs, and identify and resolve any issues or conflicts.

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Qayiya Qwabe

Configuration Analyst at NTT DATA
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Some best practices for managing CIs lifecycle is having great governance measures in place, implementing some business rules, regular reviews of CMDB data and integrating the CMDB with other tools for holistic management.

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4 Optimize your CI relationships

One of the main benefits of configuration management is that it enables you to understand and visualize the relationships and dependencies among your CIs. This can help you improve your service delivery, risk management, and impact analysis. You can use ServiceNow relationship rules, maps, and diagrams to define and display the CI relationships in your CMDB. You should also review and update your CI relationships regularly, and use them to support your ITSM processes, such as incident, problem, change, and service level management.

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5 Align your CIs with your services

The ultimate goal of configuration management is to support your IT services and business outcomes. You should align your CIs with your service portfolio, catalog, and level agreements, and use them to measure and improve your service quality, value, and customer satisfaction. You can use ServiceNow service modeling, analytics, and dashboards to link your CIs with your services, and to monitor and optimize your service performance, availability, and capacity.

ServiceNow Configuration Management is a powerful and flexible tool that can help you manage your IT assets and services effectively and efficiently. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your CIs are well-defined, well-maintained, and well-aligned with your business needs and objectives.

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Nitesh Narula

Manager - IT Change & Configuration ( cmdb) @ Gartner
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It is not about what you want to put in cmdb , it should always be about what you want out of cmdb. Based on what you want to achieve, decide what all classes of CIs should be stored in cmdb and how we can maintain them , some of common ways being - change mgmt , service catalogs etc..

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Sumukh Bharadwaj - ITIL Master and Ambassador

Manager - Service Delivery | Leading a high performing team, managing mission-critical, multi-million-dollar customer engagements | PeopleCert ITIL Ambassador | People Leader | ITSM | Hybrid Multi-Cloud Operations | SIAM
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In my view, the two biggest challenges that organisations face with CMDB are 1. Keeping it relevant 2. Having a clear "parent-child relationship" of CI's / compostion and decomposition of CI's. Some pointers : 1. It's important to have clear distinction of Technical and Business services 2. Do away with manual updates. It is never going to be fool proof. 3. If there is room to leverage intelligent discovery tools, it should be considered. 4. Frequent internal audits of the entire CMDB setup to eliminate assumptions or ambiguity.

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Rob Flores

Global IT Service Management Expert: Spearheading ITSM Tool Integrations with Software and Asset Configuration Management (SACM) for Enhanced Business Processes.
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In my experience as a global configuration manager at 2 different companies the best practices I can point to that got the biggest bang for our buck were: 1) Align with the key stakeholders in the business. 2) Clearly define Business Services, Technical Services, applications and application sub components. 3) Create standards around metadata tagging of resources. 4) Auto discover this data and automatically feed into the CMDB 5) Create policy around quarterly attestation from the identified stakeholders. 6) Implement a Continual Improvement Registry to process feedback and make improvements to the process.

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Thomas M. Tabor

Retired Senior IT Leader
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The primary purpose of the CMDB is to be the single source of truth as the basis for managing labor, software, applications, hardware, contracts.....etc. To do this every IT department needs to accept ownership of their portion of the CMDB and be accountable for its accuracy.

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What are the best practices for defining and maintaining configuration items (CIs) in ServiceNow?

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1 Identify your CIs

2 Populate your CMDB

3 Manage your CI lifecycle

4 Optimize your CI relationships

5 Align your CIs with your services

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