ITSM Hype Cycle in Plain English - Episode 7

Welcome to the 7th edition of the newsletter. This time we are focusing on the CMDB and the data stored within it. We are covering IT Service View CMDB, IT Service Dependency Mapping and Software Asset Management tools.

IT Service View CMDB

The What

Many CMDB’s do not go beyond tracking devices and components.?A mature CMDB implementation maps everything from business capability, user and IT services, to subscriptions and usage.?An IT service view CMDB improves IT decisions in nearly all areas of IT operations.?Bringing together logical, physical, people and costs.

The Why

Creating an IT Service View gives you a much better understanding of how you are providing services to your business and customers.?Having this in place allows you to make more informed decisions from supporting the service, to developing it and changing it.

For example you can use the service view to properly assess Requests and Issues by Service.?

It can also allow you to perform impact management within Change back to the underlying CI’s (Configuration Item).?Enabling IT to link any failures or issues with an underlying CI back to the affected Services and thus the actual impact.?You can then leverage the model across the CI structure to improve reporting.

By creating this type of Logical and Physical CI mapping can also lead to proactive Event Management and Problem Management.?For example, an overloaded CPU will lead to poor application performance.?Therefore run automation to add CPU’s to the virtual machine.?

However it can go broader than that.?Not only highlighting and performing the fix but also understanding the cost justification of doing it.?The cost impact to the business of NOT providing a performant solution and the aggregated cost/profit of either customers using it or the business users consuming it.

Leading on from this it should also show how your support model fits around the service and what volumes of support are needed.?This can help frame resource planning, for example the cost of moving from On-Prem to SAAS or combining services onto a containerised platform.

By combining the logical, physical, people and costs for each service gives you a complete picture of what?IT provides and complete transparency for the business to make decisions from support to C level.

The How

Creating and managing IT Service views can be complex.?The first step is to review where you are in terms of data and set 8-12 week goals for improving maps.?For most customers this might mean focusing on creating Logical CI’s to map above the Physical. Ie: A physical set of Email Services, linked to the Provisioning of the Email Service as a Logical CI, linked to the Service Catalogue – the CI categorisation used by Request and Incident.?

The next item is to look at the people and cost elements.?Bringing in more user and support data into the CMDB structure.?Mapping user groups and persona’s to services and grouping key services together (for example customer apps).?

You can then look to add the support teams of those services within the CMDB (can be used for auto routing and auto change assessment).?You now have your support and user structures mapped to what they consume/use.?

The final step is to then add in the cost’s.?Costs of suppliers/providers/3rd parties linked back to what they support and then the costs of the internal support heads.?This may also go as far as breaking down the cost of the users which consume the services (for a complete analysis).

It should be noted that there are many tools on the market which can do a level of auto-discovery and store/hold the maps within the CMDB.?However make sure you assess both your current maturity and what the drive is to improve.?This will allow you to then focus on the right tooling or leveraging existing tooling to capture the data.?

IT Service Dependency Mapping

The What

Moving on from the entire view of Services within the CMDB, IT Service Dependency focuses purely on how various components link together to provide a service to the user.?The starting point for these dependencies is usually a combination of using mapping tools alongside network scans and manual audits.

Mapping components together shows how they relate to provide an end to end service.?Allowing IT to manage key dependencies.

The Why

Many of the why’s overlap with the creation of the whole IT Service view we spoke about in the previous section.?Dependencies though are often easier to start with.?As a business you may choose to focus on this first.?

Creating the dependencies gives you the ability to look at CI impacts and understand risks during changes or during SAAS/cloud migrations.?It is the starting point for getting an ideal of how your physical CI’s relate to your logical even if you don’t bring in people and costs associated with a full Service view.

The dependencies can also still drive options to use automation and improve your ability to spot pro-active issues.

The How

The first thing to do is to make sure you’ve actually got your CI’s mapped.?Whilst this sounds obvious you can’t produce the dependencies unless you understand what you’ve got.?Discovery and mapping tools can help here.?Even leveraging network monitoring or event tools can get you an initial picture of both CI’s and dependencies.?

It’s then important to start looking at how you want to define your logical CI’s on top.?Look at how you consume Services and what is important to the business.?

Starting with a ‘top ten’ services list can be a good way to break the project down into a deliverable.?Once you’ve got the dependencies mapped it’s important to make sure you have processes to maintain them. This will need to be a mix of process and tooling for most organisations.?Making it part of any change management or onboarding process will allow you to stay on top of the dependencies and help to drive consistency.

Software Asset Management Tools

The What

The last topic in this edition is Software Asset Management Tools (or SAM for short).?The software estate can be complex, covering user devices, on prem applications, cloud apps and SaaS.?Tools can discover what you have deployed, track what you have purchased, and reconcile the two.?Managing risks from unlicenced, out of date and unsupported software.

The Why

We've spoken a lot today about the importance of understanding what you have in the context of a service map.?SAM is one component of this, and whilst all of your items within any map should come under regulatory and cost checks, Software typically has one obvious one in terms of licensing.

Licensing can also form a large part of any IT budget and expenditure.?It’s important to track and understand exactly what you are using and why.?Over time quite often businesses will purchase multiple copies or even multiple products doing very similar jobs.?This can happen because technology evolves and changes to do more, or you have improved your governance around IT and need to go back and review previous decisions.?In each case there are typically opportunities to save or consolidate cost by ensuring you are capturing your actual software usage.

On top of the potential cost savings, the other reasons why you would use a SAM tool is to manage the increasing complexity of license models, the frequency of audits and compliance checks, alongside the increasing risks of out of date software to your environment.

The How

As for any IT project it’s important to focus on the goals first.?Implementing a SAM tool can allow you to pay for what you use.?It can help make you compliant, focus on what is supported and reduce risk.?Each business may have an initial driver within that to achieve.?For example you may know what you use and your focus is on reduction rather than risk.?Or you may have already looked at cost but you know need to understand are you up to date from a release perspective.

It's also important to look at where your software is, from on-prem, to private cloud to SAAS.?Then the key software and license types within those environments.?

This will help form the requirements for the right tooling or check that you can leverage your existing tooling to achieve the project goal and outcome.

Once you’ve identified that, typically any SAM project will start with Discovery.?Once you know what you have you can then look to identify it’s uses, normalize and quantify why it’s needed before looking to potentially reconcile and optimize what you have.

Thank you for reading this edition of the newsletter and for any questions please contact [email protected]