CMDB Engagements

Evergreen's CMDB engagement is designed to take an organization's inventory, assets, problem, incident and change management processes and systems to the next level of organizational efficiency by delivering policies, processes and disciplines for effectively identifying, controlling, auditing and managing configuration data. The project is designed to create and capitalize on a global ITAM lifecycle processes and yield an integrated CMDB with both tactical and strategic organizational benefits.

Strategically the project is designed to deliver:

• Business Value Alignment
• Organizational Readiness
• Policy and Process Compliance
• Technology Enablement
• Standards and Governance
• Then, tactically, the Evergreen process focuses on three areas:
• The configuration management process
• The actual CMDB database
• Configuration Management Automation (CMA)

Download Evergreen's newest white paper via the link below:

'The Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB'.

Building the CMDB

The first and most strategic step in the process is to identify the key organizational problems that the CMDB will solve. This is accomplished through a Strategic Visioning Workshop and Assessment. By defining the key business problems and understanding the source and nature of the problems, Evergreen assists the client in developing objectives and measures for the CMDB project and defining the strategic impact on business processes, organization, technology, and IT governance and compliance. From this assessment, Evergreen assists the client in developing an end-state vision and a roadmap and plan for achieving that vision in a stepwise fashion, addressing people, process and technology at each step.

The tactical portion of the project begins by addressing the first step identified during visioning process. Getting IT Assets under lifecycle control is key to developing a successful CMDB. Evergreen will assist the client in developing or improving the IT Asset Management (ITAM) lifecycle, the first step to establishing a CMDB control process. Each of the asset classes are addressed in priority order Based upon the strategic visioning findings. Once control is established then CIs are addressed in a granular fashion, to define logical, physical and virtual CIs, with emphasis given to the hierarchical and logical relationships of CIs. As the other CMDB processes are defined, new and changed organizational roles are defined and the enabling technologies are evaluated and designed for a complete solution taking advantage of existing technologies, recommending new technologies and consolidating and rationalizing existing technologies based on the design.

The step-wise implementation of the design will yield the end-state vision in incremental steps resulting in the ability to reconcile all CI's, 'federating' them throughout all appropriate systems and processes and providing automated mapping of CI relationships, using visualization and correlation of relationships to business services and processes.

Developing Business Value for the CMDB

From a strategic point of view, the Evergreen CMDB engagement helps the client align the new processes and systems with business objectives, by assisting in building the business case for a CMDB. Metrics yielded may include:

• An 87% reduction in Incident/Problem management via better Change Management
• 20% lower cost of service delivery via better utilization of existing IT resources
• A 60-80% reduction in compliance efforts via 80-90% fewer penalties from audits

Building Concensus for the CMDB

Other strategic objectives are achieved through activities designed to develop executive commitment to the project and marketing adoption of the new policies, procedures, processes and technologies. These objectives are achieved by developing a roadmap to ensure organizational/process/technology integration and a communication plan that communicates the significant and far reaching effect that a CMDB can have on an organization.

Delivering an Integrated and Strategic CMDB Aligned with the Business

By leveraging a federated model, maintaining a tight reign on scope, and focusing on mission-critical business applications and systems, the Evergreen CMDB engagement positions an organization to extract near-term as well as long-term business value and secure the executive commitment and long-term support needed for CMDB project success.