An Uphill Task
The two main components of the IT department in most large and medium sized organizations are IT applications and IT infrastructure. While it may seem obvious, IT infrastructure includes, desktops, laptops, Local Area Network (Switches), Wide Area Network (Routers and Modems), data centers, servers, storage, back up devices etc. Each of these infrastructure components is an asset for the organization, satisfactory working of which will lead to end-user satisfaction of IT services.

Technological innovations in each of these components help IT users perform their business function efficiently and effectively. But at the same time, it creates new challenges for IT managers to maintain and manage these assets. Further, when the organization grows vertically (the number of employees) and horizontally (geographical spread), IT infrastructure also grows exponentially, increasing the challenges for IT managers.

Some of these challenges are:

• Geographical growth of business leads to the spread of IT assets and maintaining the inventory becomes a challenge.
• Business users want any-where, any-time and any-devise connectivity, which adds several devises in asset list.
• Use of mobile devises (laptops/ hand-helds/ PDAs) creates challenges in managing these devises from security point of view.
• Reducing life cycle of IT assets due to technology changes leads to faster upgradation and therefore obsolescence of earlier devises. This leads to frequent updation of the asset database.
• Configuration changes in the application and operating system due to security threats, users' changing expectation needs frequent updation of database.
• Manpower shortage (IT Skills) complicates the matter if database updation is manually done.
• End-users expect quick resolution to IT problems as they are under business pressures.

Great Expectations
To meet the above challenges, an IT manager has to perform two basic tasks:

Maintain the asset database: He should know the physical IT assets across organizations, as he needs to manage these assets. He should know the configuration of these assets to make the right decision to optimize the use of these assets.

Maintain IT service levels: He needs to track problems faced by end users and ensure quick resolution, as per the agreed SLA (Service Level Agreement) with the business.

In a small organization, maintaining a register or Excel sheet, which is manually updated, can make the above tasks easier. But for an organization with a big user base and large geographical spread, manually maintaining this database is impossible. This necessitates a tool, which helps IT manager to perform these basic tasks.

Various IMS tools, such as, HP's Openview, IBM's Tivoli, CA's Unicenter have been developed which has a basic database of IT assets and their configuration. These databases are populated by regular discovery of assets by using various discovery tools such as Microsoft SMS, Inter LANDesk, Peregrine Enterprise Discovery, Tivoli Inventory. Once the data is updated various tools are used for IT service management such as, HPOV Service Desk. This ensures an updated asset database. For maintaining SLA, reporting and monitoring of user's complaint/ problem is small part of user satisfaction, but main task is monitoring of the performance of infrastructure components.

Various other tools are integrated with the asset database for management of network, applications, servers, desktops and standard applications.

Active CMDB
In short, updated configuration management database (CMDB) is at the core of IMS. The success of IT service management and effectiveness of IT infrastructure related decisions depend on timely updation of CMDB.

CMDB automatically discovers and regularly updates configuration item attributes, ensuring CMDB data integrity and accuracy. Active CMDB detects network and distributed configuration items such as laptops, desktops, and servers by synchronizing with a variety of external systems and asset management data sources,

CMDB strategy is based on industry standards and a service-oriented architecture that automatically synchronizes management data and allows customers to combine information sources for a comprehensive view of IT. Active CMDB strategy is to allow HP and other vendors to populate and consume data consistently within the database to better unify disparate data sources. Active CMDB provides out-of-the-box support for key ITIL processes ranging from incident management to service level management and beyond. Active CMDB also understands the data elements and data relationships that support service management and asset management processes, as well as the metadata needed to support multi-process interaction.

To extend the value of CMDB data beyond IT service processes, active CMDB provides business intelligence, reports, and analyses that reveal trends and performance drivers. Data from multiple processes and external sources can be combined to produce business reports focused on the needs of IT and financial management. Defining and controlling an organization's assets establishes the foundation of an effective CMDB. Using an active CMDB strategy, customers can protect existing IT investments with the ability to integrate data from other vendors' offerings into the database. The automated data acquisition and updating process supports consolidation, reconciliation, and a variety of synchronization techniques including asset categorization based on business rules.

CMDB analyses can help IT managers align resources to meet service level requirements and reallocate asset purchases to reduce the total cost of ownership.

CMDB technology can be configured for use with any enterprise relational database system. Fully ITIL compliant, active CMDB can accommodate multiple data sources and integrate with a variety of business information systems. If Active CMDB meets all what is promised, it will be a great boon for IT managers.

Vijay S Mahajan, head, IT Infrastructure and Information Security
Mahindra & Mahindra