With infrastructures reaching new levels of complexity, common IT changes - such as updating patches on dozens of servers - can create incidents and problems that are often discovered by end users and business customers. Consequently, as technology becomes more closely intertwined with day-to-day business functions, technology-centric management practices have evolved to a business-centric focus, via service management. IBM Service Management offers a comprehensive approach that enables organizations to align business insight and innovative technology by helping you optimize the intersection of people, processes, infor-mation and technology. Changes can quickly disrupt business services due to lack of:

• Effective change management processes.
• Complete visualization of business serv-ices that may be impacted.
• Knowledge of potential change schedul-ing conflicts.
• Complete information as to process arti-facts associated with CI configuration.

The first step toward a successful IT service management implementation is to federate information within a robust change and configuration management database. IBMTivoli^® Change and Configuration Management Database(CCMDB) - a central key element of IBM Service Management - provides an enterprise-ready configuration management database and a configuration management system (CMS) platform upon which you can standardize and share process and configuration information that helps integrate people, processes, information and technology.

Tivoli CCMDB automatically discovers information about the IT infrastructure and the relationships between the configuration components within it. Through the use of discovery library adapters, data can also be consolidated from any source of intelligence, operational management products (OMPs), customer-developed applications or databases. Because of the rich configuration data built into CCMDB, it can be utilized by governing processes such as change and release management and/or incident processes to guide impact assessment. Tivoli CCMDB provides a robust base of knowledge for IBM's service management platform.

One of the challenges of managing the IT infrastructure with a business-centricfocus is being confident that the configuration database is up to date. Tivoli CCMDB delivers ITIL^®V3 - compliant automated, configurable process workflows for change and configuration management. You can leverage the information in Tivoli CCMDB to:

• Through topology graphs customers can visualize business services and drilldown to see detailed configuration information.
• See and understand the history of CIs through the linkage of all process artifacts to their associated CI.
• Assess key information about configuration items (CIs) and their relationships, including information from other man-agement tools.
• Assess and anticipate the business impact of changes and problems.

Example of IT infrastructure through CCMDB - impacted CIs

Through the integration, automation,visualization and optimization of data,workflows and policies, Tivoli CCMDB helps align the ongoing management of your IT infrastructure with your business priorities, while helping to reduce and eliminate the impact that organizational complexity has on managing the infrastructure.

Tivoli CCMDB takes the complexity out of change and configuration management by federating information from multiple data sources scattered across your environment to help you better understand configuration items, their current attributes and the relationships between them. The platform acts as a collection point for process artifacts such as requests for change (RFCs), incidents, problems service-level agreements and more. This complete set of related data associated with CIs forms a trusted and complete view of your IT environment.

Designed from the ground up and built on the industry's leading middleware, Tivoli CCMDB delivers the tools that enable flexibility to manage your configurations and changes the way that makes sense for your organization. It offers:

• An open, federated configuration management database that serves as a highly scalable platform to integrate data from virtually any source, includ-ing OMPs and customer-developed repositories.
• An open and extensible data model that can be extended to include customer-specific data attributes and CIs.
• Agentless, automated discovery and mapping to identify CIs, their attributes and dependencies.
• Automated CI reconciliation engine with user-configurable rules to ensure customers can determine which CIs are selected for inclusion and ensure that CI duplication is eliminated.
• Tooling that enables customers to discover unique environments within their IT infrastructure.
• Open and easy access via an application programming interface (API) and graphical user interfaces (GUI).
• Automated, configurable IT Infrastructure Library^® (ITIL) V3-based processes for change and configuration management.
• Completely Java™ EE-based technology.
• A configurable workflow engine to easily add automated workflows through a drag-and-drop interface - no developers required.
• Integration with third party service desks and CMDBs at the data and functional level.