I could not agree more: ITIL’s dead elephant: CMDB can’t be done. If you don’t want to read the whole article let me sum up:

  1. Immature standard with no schema
  2. Practically impossible to even identify everything that should be in the CMDB.
  3. Even if you knew what should be in it, there is no way to keep all the data up to date.
  4. Assume, you do know what should be in it and could keep it all the data up to date. Then the CMDB would not scale.
  5. Okay, assume you know what data should be in it, can keep it all up to date and you are going to use a fancy database so it all scales. The other IT groups that have to actually use the CMDB will hate it and will resent having to integrate their systems into it. Furthermore, they will actively find ways to avoid using it and will undermine it at every turn.

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