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Do you sometimes experience that anxious, unsettled feeling when you think about your IT asset and configuration data? You have invested much time and money implementing discovery tools and populating your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with huge amounts of data. You cringe, however, when someone asks you how accurate the data is and if you’d bet the company’s future on it. You know from experience both quantity and quality of data are needed to make sound decisions and your instincts are telling you that your data quality isn’t what it should be. You know you have a problem, but you don’t know how to solve it.

 

You aren’t alone

The first step is acknowledging you have a problem. Take a deep breath and draw a little comfort from knowing that even though your confronted with a problem today, there is a path to guide you to a solution. You aren’t alone in this situation. Many others have embarked on the same journey to data confidence. According to Gartner, as much as 40% of enterprise’s data is inaccurate, missing or incomplete and Forbes reports 85% of companies fail at creating CMDBs. The data quality issues you are facing are a common problem for companies and your instincts about your company’s situation are probably quite accurate.

 

Stopping the situation from worsening

Okay, you know you have a problem, but the challenge still remains – how do you solve it? Unfortunately, the mainstream approach of discovery tools and loading raw data into a IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, such as ServiceNow or Remedy, won’t help with the quality problems. It will just give you more data in your CMDB, which is likely to make your problem worse, not better. To improve data quality in your ITSM system, you must validate, scrub and refine the data as it enters your CMDB, so the data you have stored is accurate. A data quality solution, such as Blazent, can help – providing a set of robust tools to find gaps, conflicts and redundancies and to reconcile new data with your existing data.

 

Cleaning your current mess

What should do about the large volume of data you already have in your CMDB that is causing you anxiety? You can scrub it too. If you aren’t sure of the location of your data quality problems, then Blazent has recently launched a new IT Asset Risk Assessment offering that can provide you with an objective assessment of where your data quality problems are located, so you can target remediation efforts to resolve them effectively and efficiently. The data quality solutions from Blazent have enabled some companies to reach as high as 98% data quality (compared to an average of less than 70%). That is quite a big improvement.

If you clean your current data and improve the quality of new data that is either being imported or discovered, then you are likely to exceed Gartner’s statistics and transform your IT Asset and configuration data into a high-quality resource. Learn more about the IT Asset Risk Assessment.

Then the next time someone asks whether you would bet the company’s future on the data in your CMDB, you will be able to respond with a confident “yes.”