Cause of Outages

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Earlier this year, I was researching some of the largest IT outages of 2021. They all, the ones which stated the cause, were due to a configuration change.

Think about that for a moment.

Large companies with everything redundant were brought down by a configuration change.

This tells me 2 things:

1). Those organizations need to invest in a better Service Management organization, especially CMDB. They had no idea of the change risk or relationship between CIs.

2). Billions of dollars were spent on redundancy and hardening the infrastructure without a true view of risk. In the same way, many organizations have experienced security breaches from third-party partners.

Enterprise Service Management

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When we think of what Enterprise Service Management will look like five years from now, it will include a tool with workflows, but will also include:

1. All enterprise Assets and configuration items (CIs) in the same tool
2. Common set of processes throughout the enterprise, regardless of the type of technology
3. Group leadership will move toward strategy and business-focused instead of technology-focused
4. Focus will be on limiting risk and maximizing the investment in technology
5. People will become the most valuable differentiator for success

Conflict

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It might be unsaid, unmet, or unfair expectations.

I have found this axiom true in 3 distinct (among others) ways in the ITSM and ITAM worlds 🌎 .

1. Leadership thinks there’s an understanding of licensing within the ranks, then comes a software audit.

2. Lack of a RACI with persona-based training so everyone knows what is expected of them.

3. Lack of understanding regarding segregation of duty for changes.

These types of situations cause conflict within an organization.

Relationships

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Just like in our personal and professional lives, the CMDB is only as good as its relationships.

The value in a CMDB is in the relationships reflected. Think of how a CMDB is consumed. It is to

1. Aid the assessment of changes,
2. Speed up the resolution of incidents
3. Help understand the health, performance, and compliance of the configuration items (CIs)
4. And, much more including service costing, service levels, and many other aspects of managing an IT environment

Like in our lives, invest in the CMDB relationships. They are key to understanding your environment.