Third Sky's 2-3 day Building an Effective CMDB Workshop is grounded in the industry best practice guidelines of the ITIL framework and expanded through our extensive, practical experience in modeling Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) with our clients. The workshop helps our clients learn the importance of an effective CMDB to their overall IT Service Management (ITSM) activities, and to create a draft CMDB model through the facilitation of an experienced Third Sky ITSM consultant.

Our workshop includes education, knowledge transfer, and hands-on work to create from scratch and/or advance and extend the client's CMDB model. Key topics and areas explored include:

• The Configuration Management process and the role of the Configuration Manager
• The importance of the CMDB to Configuration Management and the other ITIL processes
• Separating and relating concepts such as Services vs. Systems, and Configuration Items (CIs) vs. Components and Attributes
• Categories and sub-categories of CIs, and possible data source(s) for each
• Validating the scope, depth, and structure of the CMDB model
• Validating / identifying key CIs, and mapping and maintaining their inter-relationships
• Creating sample end-to-end system models and their relationships to services
• Next steps planning, including a phased approach to expanding the scope and/or depth of the CMDB - ensuring effectiveness in the real world

The deliverables for the workshop include:

• Onsite delivery at the client's location to a group of up to 10 participants
• A copy of the workshop's educational presentation
• All updates to / improvements to the client's CMDB model as documented during the hands on segment of the workshop

The scalable and extensible CMDB model that is delivered via this workshop helps our clients realize such valuable benefits as:

• Improved effectiveness of impact analysis during Change Management, dramatically reducing the number of failed changes
• Better information for the Service Desk, Incident Management and Problem Management - improving restoration and resolution times and reducing breaches of Service Levels Agreements
• Better management of Availability, Capacity, and IT Service Continuity

Pricing for the workshop varies by number of days and number participants. Please contact your regional representative or sales@thirdsky.com for detailed pricing and scheduling information.