Using SAM to Create & Maintain your CMDB

Using SAM to Create & Maintain your CMDB – Introduction:

Hot on the heels of having created the SAM Global Report for 2018, SAM Charter is looking to strengthen its relationship with Service Management Technology providers.  Of particular interest to us, is ServiceNow.  More recently, their SAM Pro module is gaining wider adoption within their existing customer base, as the advantages of working from and revolving around a golden source of truth makes managing your IT estate that much easier – whether you are in Service Management, SAM, Info Sec or BCM/DR.  To that end, we have crafted a paper entitled “Using SAM to Create & Maintain your CMDB.”

Using SAM to Create & Maintain your CMDB – the deeper dive:

SAM Charter have sought to provide a solution on how best to align SAM data with your CMDB – but not just from an initiation/bench-marking phase, but also through the life of the CMDB itself.

Silver bullets are rare thing in IT, and the approach suggested will not come without some work to be undertaken.  Most notably, end-user organizations will have to:

  • Enforce governance and culture changes
  • Revise and update their software/IT request process
  • Have a SAM system in place which supports ISO 19770-2 tags (SWID)

It will also require the SAM Team to let go of the notion that it is an ELP machine.  The conundrum we are looking to resolve is that Service Management/ the business view the IT estate in a “North to South” view of technology that supports a business service.  Whereas SAM takes and “East to West” view of vendor deployments across the IT estate.  The manner in which to resolve/ blend these views is to deploy software tags alongside the software installations.

The advantages:

By adopting such an approach of tagging your software deployments with the services they honour you will be able to:

  • Offer TCO/ ROI against an IT service (every business owner would kill for this data)
  • Model the software cost over the life of the IT service, as all new software requests should be aligned to the service is supports
  • Help prioritise patching and version data for Information Security to target vulnerability improvements
  • Help spot deployments of software that are not tagged (if they aren’t tagged then what role is the software playing?) In short, you can have a lean IT estate in line with the IT services the business demands

Obviously, this blog is just a snap-shot of a bigger whitepaper, so if you wish to take a deeper dive into how you can have SAM & your CMDB working and playing well together, then please head over to our whitepapers page to download your copy today.

Huge thanks must also go to ServiceNow, who have also agreed to host this paper on their SAM webpage (exact link to follow in due course).  It’s really encouraging to see such a large organisation recognise the value and approach in using SAM to Create & Maintain your CMDB as outlined by SAM Charter.

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