Making sense of the madness whilst reducing risk

 

Service Configuration Manager (SCM) is an industry-leading Configuration Management System (CMS) and CMDB which integrates seamlessly into your existing ITSM environment and provides you with an award winning, enterprise grade, configuration management solution.

Implementation of a corporate-wide CMS has not been a trivial task for many organisations which have grown through mergers and acquisitions and have accumulated configuration data in a multitude of tools such as Help Desk IT service management products, software audit systems, databases, spreadsheets and directory services.

 

Developed over many years by our partner Interlink Software, SCM is different to other solutions as it does not require the wholesale transfer of the existing data and its maintenance processes from the current sources. Instead, SCM enables the federation and/or import of this data, automatically detecting updates to the data from the originating sources and populating its central CMS. This approach exploits the benefits of a central, corporate-wide CMS without the pain (and expense) of a massive “big bang” migration.

SCM was given "Value Leader" Rating Among 11 CMDB/CMS Vendors in the most recent EMA Radar Report. SCM was distinguished as providing "a complete system for Service Impact Management with powerful insights into the impact of change, and a compelling and mature capability to assimilate third-party sources to assimilate interdependencies across the full service infrastructure".” Source: EMA Radar for CMDB Service Impact Management, Dennis Drogseth, June 2011.

 

Pragmatic Deployment Model - Top Down, Service-at-a-Time

 

SCM was developed from the outset to address the need to maintain up to date service dependency maps, linking logical and physical IT elements, commonly known as Configuration Items (CI), to the business functions and overall business services that they under-pin.

SCM addresses this requirement by offering a flexible top down, service at-a-time deployment methodology in abject contrast to the boil-the-ocean approach to
configuration management that often requires the entire IT estate to be defined in a monolithic Configuration Management Database (CMDB) before moving on to the
next steps in the service management value chain such as Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking and Business Service Management (BSM).

SCM enables the integration of one or more data sources (configuration, systems management, service catalogue, SLA, asset, etc.) mapping the contents to business service dependency maps resulting in an overarching view of individual business services, an entire organisation or group of associated organisations. By taking a pragmatic, top down service-at-a-time approach to deploying SCM and carefully analysing each data source to be integrated with SCM, incremental benefit can be realised as configuration management for each business service is released, unlocking risk of change by service, business service management, automated SLA tracking and a host of other benefits within the organisation.

Key Benefits

SCM is the Configuration Management System platform of choice for some of the largest organisations in the world because in addition to enabling them to take control of their assets and understand the relationships between them, SCM also delivers many other benefits including:

• Ability to create IT compliance reports by business service
• Identify the impact of IT changes on business services BEFORE the changes are made
• Analyse the risk of and to schedule the implementation of IT changes from a business perspective
• Identify and re-schedule conflicting changes
• Deliver a forward schedule of change by business service or technology
• Identify unauthorised changes to their IT infrastructure
• Automate the management of the lifecycle of IT assets
• Visualise IT infrastructure-to-business dependencies for their organisation
• Centralise operational documentation with context sensitive launching
• Achieve Compliance via an automated audit trail of IT infrastructure changes
• Low-to-no-maintenance Business Service Management (BSM) – change to the CMS drives BSM updates.
• Track infrastructure and business services via an automated Service Catalogue
• Report on the cost of delivering business services identifying technology, people and real estate required to deliver services