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Nice article this month from Line56.com – about the business value of a CMDB.

It’s by the ex CTO of Marimba – who is now CTO of the Change and Configuration Management space at BMC – Kia Behnia.

I’d expect BMC to push a CMDB message – they after all message ITIL heavily and have a CMDB product.

The nice piece about this article is the real difference ‘process’ and ‘best practices’ can bring – regardless of your management technology.

The other truth is that a single repository as a CMDB is unworkable – a ‘meta-CMDB’ or ‘virtual-CMDB’ is far more realistic. Kia refers to federated CMDB:

However, not all management data related to configuration items are appropriate for storage in the CMDB. This is why organizations should consider a CMDB based on a federated data model. Why? Just like links within the general ledger to financial details stored in the accounts receivable system, a federated CMDB links to IT details. For example, a federated approach allows for other useful management information — such as service level agreements, purchase orders, incident and problem tickets, performance and utilization data–to be linked to the configuration items within the CMDB.