If the CMDB can claim one thing its that its been in the 'news' a lot - Nothing gets a group of ITSM consultants/practitioners going than talk about the CMDB, its value, different approaches and so on. But does the hype translate into reality, or is the CMDB just another one of a series of IT fads that explode onto the scene, but are forgotten only a few years later?  

Even with the more pragmatic approach in ITIL v3, the CMDB continues to be over hyped. Despite all its attention, I saw a statistic at the recent Gartner conference that only 5% of the fortune 500 has a fully implemented and working CMDB? 5%! What a poor hype to reality ratio!  

This ties in with my observations too. In the last five years or so, I've only seen one CMDB that was really delivering value for that business, and fully integrated into their ITSM processes. When I heard how much time, effort, resources and money they put into it, I had to go and sit down for a while and have a glass of water, so while it was adding value, the ROI was very questionable. But outside that, I had seen a litany CMDB projects that either end up being only somewhat useful, or fall by the wayside and slowly get abandoned as they are not updated or maintained. Unfortunately, I also saw quite a few projects start simply because 'ITIL says we should'. No wonder these failed. 

But back to the premise of this article - will the current financial crisis give the CMDB hype the cold shower that it deserves? I think so. 

It’s certainly not going to eliminate the CMDB, but I do believe that when IT organizations are asked to cut budget, one of the first candidates is going to be the ongoing CMDB effort. the project probably won't get scrapped yet, but it probably will get put on hold, and then die a slow death starved for resources and attention.  

I also think that new projects are going to have to demonstrate a clear ROI, and without using funny math, its pretty difficult to justify the CMDB. I think the CMDB hype has flourished mostly because of a view that the CMDB was needed for other facets of ITSM, like BSM, Change Management and so on, but I think people are waking up to the fact that to implement a CMDB to solve these problems is like using a tank to kill a cockroach.  

It is going to be interesting to see. Many ITSM vendors (BMC in particular) have aligned their considerable marketing machine around the CMDB concept. Will they be toning down the message over the next few years?

We're already seeing more and more skepticism from the analyst community too, with finally some acknowledgement that the CMDB is not the center of the universe and that its not a necessity for most IT shops.   Of course there are cases where the CMDB does make more sense, such as during major M&A activity, or data center moves, but even there,  other approaches can be considered.

In summary, I think we're going to see the hype die down, with more focus on delivering value for the business and saving costs and less on internally facing systems with questionable value.