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The Social CMDB:
The Configuration Management Database Is a Social Media Channel
By Tobin Isenberg, Novell Connection Magazine - March 2011

Here's an excerpt:

ITIL defines a CMDB as a specialized data repository that provides the authoritative source for information about all the infrastructure elements that participate in the delivery of key business services—their identities, attributes, configuration states, and perhaps most importantly, their relationships with and dependencies on other configuration items (CIs). As a key component of the ITIL framework’s configuration and change management processes, the CMDB supports a very wide range of management functions and activities, and it needs to be accessible to a wide range of users from across the business. Many of these will be casual users with little expertise in special-use databases, yet all must be able to access the CMDB’s information and functionality quickly and easily with a minimum of orientation or mediation.

One way to make the CMDB more user friendly is to expose its features through a Web-based interface, leveraging the intuitive interactive techniques that are universally familiar from social media to simplify navigation, information access and collaboration.

Introducing Novell Operations Center CMS

The Novell Operations Center Configuration Management System (CMS) allows everyone in the organization to contribute data and share knowledge about configuration items (CIs), providing a way to build and maintain a CMDB collaboratively. When more users can contribute, the CMDB inevitably becomes a more accurate representation of the actual IT infrastructure.

When you first log in to the Novell Operations Center CMS, the home page displays a summary of news, information and links determined by your preferences and membership in various CMS communities, allowing you to focus immediately on content of interest with minimum noise and distraction. (See Figure 1.) The summary page has two domain views: a home view that includes content from all your CMS communities, and group-specific views for each community. Key features of this interface and the logic behind it include:

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It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.