Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Forrester sees an effective IT asset management (ITAM) system as a prerequisite for establishing business service management. The reason is simple: If you don't know your IT estate, you cannot build and support sophisticated service levels. Nor can you record accurate financials and establish a financial chargeback system for the services. Underlying many ITAM solutions is a data repository known as a configuration management database (CMDB). But the CMDB is an application that, perhaps leveraging an effective ITAM system, maps the linkages between business services, their metrics, and the configuration items (CIs) being maintained by an IT infrastructure. Forrester believes that the implementation of a CMDB is a key next step after IT asset management is established; the CMDB is used to provide the logical and physical picture of how these assets are connected to the business services or applications of a business.

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