Accelerate your digital transformation with ITAM and CMDB

Previously, we explained the basics of ITAM and CMDB, as well as the benefits and potential limitations. But now it's time to delve a little deeper into how combining ITAM and CMDB can help you in different areas of your IT operations, enabling agility and better decision-making as a competitive advantage.

It is no longer a matter of whether we embrace the digitalisation of business operations. Now, it is about how it is incorporated into the core of IT organisations—and the business's extended functions to drive efficiency, enhance productivity, and ensure seamless operations. You may have seen lots of information online comparing ITAM with CMDB, but we’re going to talk about them both and how they complement each other.

Yes and no. ITAM can be used without Configuration Management, but a CMDB is normally built upon an Asset Management practice, taking the present asset information and turning these into Configuration Items (CIs). assets can be used without appreciating the underlying relationships to other assets. However, this is where the CMDB extends your Asset Management practice to enable a more holistic view of the dependencies. So, not having a CMDB to support your ITAM practice is a missed opportunity. Take a look at the next couple of sections to understand why.

ITAM and CMDB complement each other, forming a symbiotic relationship that empowers organisations to overcome challenges and unlock the full potential of their digital infrastructure. It's important to remember that assets have financial value to an organisation. However, configuration items are things that you track that impact the delivery of a service. This shared information between ITAM and CMDB enhances accuracy, increases efficiency, and enables organisations to make data-driven decisions. ITAM provides the foundation for CMDB by delivering accurate asset data, while CMDB enriches ITAM by offering a holistic view of the IT landscape and interdependencies between assets. Let’s take a look at how this is demonstrated in use cases.

The potential use cases for ITAM and CMDB are vast and varied. Here are a few popular ones:

• Managing software licences: Organisations can leverage ITAM and CMDB practices to identify unused or underutilised software licences, leading to cost savings and enhanced licence compliance. As well as reducing the risk of unnecessary penalties within ITSM, this practice is known as Software Asset Management (SAM).
  
  
• Change Enablement and Incident Management: ITAM and CMDB provide a holistic view of the IT landscape, enabling effective management of ITSM practices such as Change Enablement and faster incident resolution whilst minimising service disruptions. This provides the full context on change requests to understand risks, while giving insights into potential causes of incidents, to ensure that the root cause of incidents is fully understood. This also improves the Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR).

• Management decision-making: Organisations can utilise ITAM and CMDB together to support their decisions to accurately identify resource requirements, optimise utilisation, and make informed investment decisions when deciding on major software technology changes, for example.
  
  
• Lifecycle Management: The power combination of ITAM and CMDB allows proper end-to-end visibility over all assets. Integrated fully, this can start from the moment a new asset is identified as required, right through to the end of life.
  
  
• Optimise and automate: A fully populated CMDB enables staff to quickly understand interdependencies, leading to a more effective and efficient service, reducing toil and allowing the team to focus on higher-value activities that improve the customer’s experience. This can be further enhanced by using the CIs to drive automation, for example, to automate the creation of Standard Changes from a catalogue in the CMDB, based on the history of successfully implemented Normal Changes.