This paper describes recommended best practices for designing and implementing an enterprise CMDB based on the knowledge and experience of Mercury and Consulting-Portal, an ITIL implementation company.

Growing complexity and rapid change in today’s IT environments have many IT organizations scrambling to improve their change management and configuration management procedures. Old methods of tracking IT systems are no longer adequate and it is almost impossible to deliver the service levels required by the business today without an accurate knowledge of the status and configuration of IT applications and infrastructure.

Inaccurate configuration data leads to poor decisions that often result in errors. Analysts believe that 70 to 80 percent of production incidents are a result of introduced change. If IT organizations could more effectively assess the business impact of changes, some of these incidents could be avoided. Effective configuration management not only helps assess the impact of change, but also enables IT teams to accelerate problem isolation and resolution. As a result, there is a direct correlation between configuration management and the performance and availability of IT services.