Skep,
As usual you are right, especially when you are making sense. :-0
Maybe the ITSM community needs to stop thinking about the CMS / CMDB as a process (which has defined inputs and outputs) or a thing or a database. Instead we can think about it as a broad collection of activities that help maintain information and documentation on the configuration of assets and software inside an organization. This isn't a black or white implementation where you do it all or you don't do any--most organizations span the spectrum of gray.
The trouble with ITIL (as if there were only one) is the concept of a CMS is so abstract that most people have trouble understanding it. This is by design--it saves the authors the trouble of actually doing anything. I still have trouble describing ITIL's take on the CMS, and I have done practical implementations in a dozen organizations.
Let's start helping practitioners in a practical way by listing and describing the various CM activities that take may take place and the benefits and costs associated with each.
For example:
- Automated discovery of hardware assets
- Automated discovery of installed software assets
- Automated discovery of network assets
- Automated linking of software and hardware assets
- Automated linking of hardware and network assets
- Automatic reporting on software compliance and unused licenses
- Linking Incidents to CI's
- Linking Changes to CI's
- Linking Problems to CI's
- Linking CI's to end-users
- Linking CI's to end-user organizations
This list is VERY incomplete, and there is no out of the box solution for any of the above. There is a wide variety of expression of CI names, CI types, attributes, and statuses of the above items. Each can be automated to different levels.
By making a checklist we can help practitioners and organizations understand what they can do, what other organizations do, and what they should consider in the future. It would be a list of available options, rather than a document of the One True Way dictated high from above. We can expand on Skep's checklist concept.
A list or checklist of practical activities could also feed into a maturity assessment.
We can call it the Management of the Configuration of the Configuration Management Database Database. Or we can call it WikiCMDB for short. :-)
