A number of our employees are currently spending a fairly large amount of their time helping a customer with a task.  In a perfect world, this task would be completely unnecessary.  Suffice it to say that there is some maintenance that must be performed on a number of systems before the year is out, and they are having trouble getting responses from the system administrators who are responsible for the systems.

When we perform assessments, we often ask our customers about whether they have a configuration management database (CMDB) or something similar.  While CMDB systems may be useful for performing a physical inventory of your systems, that isn’t the real benefit. The real power of a CMDB comes in being able to track the current configuration, status, health, usage, and ownership of every system in the organization.  Let’s say a new patch is released; an up-to-date CMDB can help you understand what systems the patch applies to, whether they need to be patched and/or need prerequisite requirements fulfilled, what applications should be tested before and after the patch, and who the administrator(s) and owner(s) of the system are.

In this particular case, while there is a CMDB, it doesn’t do a good job of tracking the administrators and owners of their systems.  We are experiencing a huge gap in responsibility management.  While we may know of a system which needs maintenance, we don’t know who is responsible for its maintenance, and who is responsible for the information and applications which may be affected by the maintenance on that system.  In this organization, they are typically different people from different parts of the organization, who may not have even met.

Without understanding who is responsible for the system, the applications running on it, and the information stored within it, you are setting yourself up for problems. Well, you’re at least setting yourself up for many frantic emails and phone calls as deadlines draw near.