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.

On its own, the baseline data captured on the Service Portal can be useful. The Portal logs can be found under Service Portal > Log Entries, and some basic reporting can be found under Service Portal > Usage Overview. While the baseline functionality is powerful, with a little configuration you can capture and display more usable information. This blog post will share some suggestions for how to glean more value from the baseline data.

When it comes to IT standards, the ITIL (formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework is different from regulatory standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and HIPAA. While those standards require organizations to demonstrate compliance or risk harsh consequences such as fines, the ITIL framework is a voluntary set of best practices for organizations to follow to ensure that they’re aligning their IT services with the needs of the business. It’s both nonprescriptive and nonproprietary.

ITIL 4, the first major update of the framework since 2007, largely emphasizes the same values and priorities as previous versions. However, ITIL 4 was designed to keep up with recent trends in software development and IT operations. Here are four of the most significant changes to the ITIL framework.