Your CMDB was wrong the day you finished it.

I used to think the CMDB was a discipline problem. I was wrong. It was wrong the day we finished it, and it was going to be wrong no matter how hard anyone groomed it. The reason is structural: the person who knows the truth about a system is the engineer who just changed it, and that person has zero incentive and negative time to update a form.

The CMDB's highest value was never the inventory. It was correlation: this alert is that incident, caused by that change, on that service. Then ITIL paired correlation with asset management and buried it under hundreds of attributes with different owners, different cadences, and different definitions of correct. The job that mattered drowned.

So invert it. Keep only the prize. An ICDB, an Identity Correlation Database, is a name and a type, and everything else comes from associations, not attributes: what it fired, what it belongs to, what fixed it. Identity earned by evidence, not declared by an import. Keep your CMDB for compliance and assets; let the identity database be the one your operational decisions depend on.