Associating Business Value with Discovery Development

The use case for developing new discovery content should be driven by a business case and plan to produce business value. That is, the goal of mapping system components to CIs and adding them to the CMDB is to provide business value.

The content may not always be used for application mapping, although this is a common intermediate step for many use cases. Regardless of the end use of the content, your plan should answer the following questions:

• Who is the consumer? How should the consumer act on the information provided by the CIs (and the relationships between them)? What is the business context in which the CIs and relationships are to be viewed? Is the consumer of these CIs a person or a product or both?

• Once the perfect combination of CIs and relationships exists in the CMDB, how do I plan on using them to produce business value?

• What should the perfect mapping look like?

  • What term would most meaningfully describe the relationships between each CI?

  • What types of CIs would be most important to include?

  • What is the end usage and end user of the map?

• What would be the perfect report layout?

Once the business justification is established, the next step is to embody the business value in a document. This means picturing the perfect map using a drawing tool and understanding the impact and dependencies between CIs, reports, how changes are tracked, what change is important, monitoring, compliance, and additional business value as required by the use cases.

This drawing (or model) is referred to as the blueprint.

For example, if it is critical for the application to know when a certain configuration file has changed, the file should be mapped and linked to the appropriate CI (to which it relates) in the drawn map.

Work with an SME (Subject Matter Expert) of the area, who is the end user of the developed content. This expert should point out the critical entities (CIs with attributes and relationships) that must exist in the CMDB to provide business value.

One method could be to provide a questionnaire to the application owner (also the SME in this case). The owner should be able to specify the above goals and blueprint. The owner must at least provide a current architecture of the application.

You should map critical data only and no unnecessary data: you can always enhance the adapter later. The goal should be to set up a limited discovery that works and provides value. Mapping large quantities of data gives more impressive maps but can be confusing and time consuming to develop.

Once the model and business value is clear, continue to the next stage. This stage can be revisited as more concrete information is provided from the next stages.