Patent ID: 8489547

Claim:
A method for synchronizing identifiers of information technology (IT) infrastructure configuration items (CIs) in an enterprise configuration management database, the method comprising: providing a plurality of CIs extracted from a plurality of domain-specific configuration management databases (dCMDBs) that comprise an enterprise configuration management database (eCMDB); applying a set of transformation rules to the CIs that augment identifiers of each of the plurality of CIs with scoping information on the dCMDB from which the CI was extracted, wherein a domain-specific identifier for each of the plurality of CIs is replaced with an enterprise identifier based on a combination of fields that are guaranteed to be unique for the target eCMDB; wherein for each dCMDB with an augmented CI, information regarding the augmented CI is propagated up a tree representing the eCMDB until a highest level node is reached, then propagating the augmented CI downward to each lower level dCMDB, to resolve all references to the augmented CI; locating all CI's in the eCMBD that reference the augmented CI and updating the located CI's to replace the domain-specific identifier for the augmented CI with the unique enterprise identifier for the augmented CI; and synchronizing only those CIs in a dCMDB that have changed since a previous synchronization with the eCMDB.