Keeping track of thousands of workstations across your organization isn’t just about inventory. It’s about security, compliance, and cost control. Over time, users leave, devices move, and contracts expire. Without clear visibility, organizations risk having unassigned or uncovered devices, which can result in compliance gaps and unnecessary expenses.
With Data Content Manager (DCM), you can automate these checks and visualize your data relationships in a single Blueprint—ensuring every workstation is correctly linked to an active user and a valid contract. (What’s a Blueprint?)
So, let’s make sure that …
- Workstations are assigned to ACTIVE users.
- A valid contract covers each workstation.
You can use the same approach for any mobile or other devices in your CMDB. You only need to create another Blueprint in DCM to address the different devices or expand this one.
Assign Workstations Only to Active Users
Instead of building custom reports or maintaining complex business rules, you can address this use case directly with Data Content Manager, and it only takes a few minutes to implement.
First, you create a Blueprint with the Personal Computer CI as the root class and link it to the User table through the Assigned to reference. Then, you add the condition Active is true to ensure that only active users are considered valid.
This is what the Blueprint looks like in DCM’s Blueprint Designer, with the Active is True condition highlighted:
When you run an audit (More about Audits) against this Blueprint, DCM automatically finds deviations, such as workstations assigned to inactive or departed users. These data gaps can then be automatically assigned to the relevant Data Providers to fix. (What’s a Data Provider?)
You can automate this by scheduling these audits to run at regular intervals. Regular and continuous auditing enables the early detection and correction of data issues as they arise, preventing problems with operations or compliance.
More about automating Data Quality with DCM here.
Once user assignments are under control, the next step is to verify that a valid contract also covers each workstation.
Ensure That a Valid Contract Covers Workstations
The second part of our exercise is to make sure that a valid Contract covers each Workstation.
Ensuring that a valid contract covers each workstation is an essential part of maintaining financial accuracy, compliance, and service reliability. Contracts define ownership, warranty, and support obligations, which directly affect how assets are managed and accounted for.
Verifying a single reference field and a few related conditions is relatively simple. It becomes more challenging when you also need to confirm that each workstation has a corresponding Asset record and that a valid contract covers the asset.
It becomes even more complex when different types of ownership are involved. This is the case, for example, when contracts are required only for leased, loaned, or rented assets, but not for those that the organization owns itself.
To validate this correctly, you need to check:
- The Asset reference linking the Configuration Item (CI) to the corresponding asset
- The Assets Covered many-to-many relationship between assets and contracts
- Specific conditions on the asset record (such as ownership type)
- And that the contract itself is active and valid
While it’s possible to script these checks or build custom reports, Data Content Manager makes the process far simpler. You can incorporate all these relationships and conditions directly into the Blueprint created earlier, ensuring accurate, repeatable validation without additional development or maintenance effort.
So, let’s expand our Blueprint to cover all these requirements:
With these additional relationships in place, your Blueprint now defines both user and contract requirements. The next step is to test it against your data and see what happens.
Actionable Audit Results
Now that we have defined the requirements in our new Blueprint, the next step would be to run an audit. Click here to see how.
Once the Audit is complete, let’s look at what the audit results look like in our example.
Below is a screenshot of an Audit results overview grouped by Blueprint Elements. Blueprint Elements are parts of the Blueprint that are checked and reported separately by DCM’s Audit Engine.
In our demo data example, the audit results revealed that 12% of workstations were unassigned, and 1% were linked to inactive users. In addition, 215 workstations required a contract, yet only about half were covered. Of those contracts, 25% were no longer valid.
You can drill down into any detail within the results, allowing you to move from high-level summaries to specific records—for example, viewing the exact workstations missing valid user or contract links.
The example above shows the outcome of a single audit run. By scheduling audits to run at regular intervals, you will identify these deviations as they occur, not after an annual data quality review project.
Ongoing results and trends can be easily monitored through the DCM Audit Dashboards, while Data Providers can review and correct issues directly within the DCM Data Quality Workspace. (What's the Data Quality Workspace?)
Again, no coding or custom reporting is required. Once your requirements are defined in the Blueprint, Data Content Manager automatically manages the validation, tracking, and follow-up process.
In Summary
People come and go, and so do workstations and other assets. The lifecycle of end-user devices is relatively short, but a significant amount of money can be saved or lost depending on how these assets are managed. The security aspect is also considerable: Every lost device is a potential risk.
In this example, a single Blueprint is all that’s needed to monitor both active user assignments and contract coverage. Creating it takes about 15 minutes and is a matter of dragging and dropping the required elements onto a canvas to define the requirements for this data.
There’s no need for scripting, custom reports, or developer involvement. With Data Content Manager, you can manage these checks directly, without waiting for release cycles or complex configuration changes.
By embedding these checks into your CMDB and Foundation Data structures, you create a sustainable foundation for data governance. Relationships between users, assets, and contracts remain continuously validated. This approach enhances CMDB health, streamlines compliance reporting, and provides the reliable, real-time visibility required for effective IT asset and service management.
Wrapping Up
This example covered just one straightforward, but powerful, use case of what Data Content Manager can do. Once you see how easy it is to visualize relationships and automate data validation, it becomes clear how the same approach can be applied across your CMDB.
Here are a few other practical examples:
- 5 Challenges to Address for Better CMDB Data Quality
- How To Ensure Workflows Don’t Fail Over User Data
- Webinar: How to Improve Data Governance in ServiceNow
On a broader scale, most of our customers use DCM to help achieve and maintain CSDM alignment, strengthening the foundation of their ServiceNow data model.
Try it Yourself
You can easily try this use case in your own non-production environment. We offer a Free Guided Trial of Data Content Manager, where our team helps you install the product, build Blueprints, and run audits using your own data. You don’t need to invest time learning the tool—we’ll guide you through each step.
You receive the results, insights, and the opportunity to see how DCM can enhance your data quality and compliance. There’s no cost or commitment, but a chance to experience the full value of Data Content Manager in your own ServiceNow instance.
