Seeking to clarify a relationship? Try a Business Service view.
July 22, 2010A client recently called Info-Tech’s Advisory Service to discuss their needs for maintaining information regarding the relationship between hardware, software and various business facing IT services. The client request signaled a need for a configuration management database (CMBD) but the maturity of their existing change management process is not quite ready for the disciplined approach required to succeed. Info-Tech pointed out that based on the customer’s size (200 users and 20+ IT staff) there is a middle ground approach using Visio or other visualization tools to map out the relationships between systems providing a given service.
Visio offers a decent integration with Microsoft’s tools, as well as Assetgen. By documenting their system configurations and relationships they’ll be that much more prepared do go ahead with a CMDB.
There are a number of solutions that bolt onto Visio, or vice versa, Info-Tech suggested holding off on the automation for now until they master configuration decomposition. By using a business service view to break down the configurations you seek to document it will be much clearer what items relate to each other.
Move from a diagram like this;
(Source: Info-Tech Research Group)
By breaking the service down;
(Source: Info-Tech Research Group)
To a diagram like this;
(Source: Info-Tech Research Group)
See also:
How Value Propositions Improve Network Technology Decisions
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