The promises of the CMDB have been around a long time. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) popularized the concept back in the 1980s and 1990s as a foundational element of IT service management.

The benefits are clear: having a trusted data source with a rich set of relational information provides organizations with decision-making capabilities to support more efficient operations, better user experiences and proactive mitigation of risk. The marketplace has no shortage of services, technologies and service management platforms that support and rely on the CMDB. A CMDB, and by extension, the capabilities it enables, continues to be an important goal for organizations, even more so now considering the impact of digital transformation.

Leaders within most of the organizations I work with realize that data analytics must be a central component of their digital transformation efforts. But they often don’t understand the work that a robust analytics program entails. More than once, I’ve spoken with executives whose firms have purchased advanced analytics tools, and they’re confused about why…