Hello,

I have been reading a number of your articles today and I was wondering if you could spare a few moments to describe (or provide some URLs to relevant articles) how perhaps a Currency Management fits in with this concept of 'CMDB'. For this purpose I will describe Currency Management as a process to determine a CIs:

• operating state against a 'gold' configuration standard; version compliance
• lifecycle within the company: primary use, contain the use, has the company retired the CI
• lifecycle from the vendor: end of life, end of support

Although, I can see how a Currency Management system would use some of the information available from a CMDB (set of data repositories) I am not sure if it should take on the central role of designing and implementing a CMDB infrastructure/service/capability.

Thoughts?

Thank-you for your time ...
Paul

Paul,

You are right on both counts. The Currency Management system sounds very much like one of the Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) that reside within a Configuration Management System (CMS), and the effort to undertake the implementation of a full CMS should not be undertaken lightly.

Have you had a chance to look at ITIL V3 yet? It made some important changes in the Configuration Management process. Most notable is that it recognizes that there is not a single, unified CMDB that serves the entire organization. Instead, it introduces a Configuration Management System that pulls together all of the CMDBs that exist within an organization. It puts them under the control of a single set of management processes, fosters exchange of data, but does not attempt to create a single monolithic database.

Without knowing the type of organization you work for or the maturity of its ITIL processes, it is hard to answer the question of whether it should initiate a CMS implementation program prior to implementing the Currency Management system. A pragmatic approach would be to use the CMS project to bring its CMS processes in line with ITIL guidance, and then expand the processes to the other CMDBs. All of the data necessary to answer your database questions can be identified as attributes of the Configuration Items (CI), or identified via the CMS meta-database as to where it can be found or discovered (as needed). There might be a need to establish a reference database that contains the information as what constitutes currency, but not a separate repository of CIs.

You can find out more about the V3 Configuration Management System in the OGC’s Service Transition volume. The Service Transition Lifecycle and the Release, Control and Validation (RCV) Capability certification courses also address the Configuration Management System.

I hope this helps answer your question.