Recently in CMDB Category

A recent article providing SOA implementation tips argues in part, that SOA is a transformational technology with great value – but transformation comes with prerequisites for careful planning and implementation as opposed to something that is just dropped into an IT shop. For example, the operations and management of both the architecture and newly developed services need to be considered by IT operations.

More often than not, I find most IT operations groups are aware that a SOA is being designed, services (versus applications) are being developed, and business processes are being modeled and mapped to these services. However, IT operations groups often have ITIL process improvements and BSM initiatives underway and want to know how this new technology architecture will affect current operations, processes, and how they should plan for the future.

As such, I’m often asked, “Does your technology support SOA?” Quite simply, the answer is yes, Managed Objects can manage the new SOA infrastructure; provide bi-directional integration to a SOA-based infrastructure; and manage SOA services via integration mapping processes and transactions/activity to supporting technology.

However, the more important question that should be explored deals with dependency. What impact will this new architecture have on projects such as configuration management – as in the CMDB (also referred to as the configuration management system or CMS)? If IT operations thinks current CMDB projects are challenging – consider for a moment “decomposing” those legacy applications into many smaller pieces like Lego blocks: the complexity of the CMDB just exploded in scale and in the sheer volume of CI’s and relationships.

The future challenge and success will rest upon building sound change, configuration and CMDB foundation today. A well constructed CMDB will reap many rewards going forward regardless of new technologies and architectures.

SOA is dependent upon a CMDB that is constructed with the least amount of constraints and is flexible enough to receive inputs from different technology in the future to deliver to the requirements of the future as they evolve. Maximum control with the least amount of data is the best rule of thumb and do not be constrained by today’s technology and requirements.

- Michele

Few that would argue that rolling out a business service management approach to an organization is highly valuable and beneficial. One of the biggest challenges, however, continues to be what this BSM solution should look like to its consumers. Is it a dashboard with a stoplight like layout? Is it speedometer tracking how quickly things are moving along on a production line? Is it information laid out on a world map highlighting contributions from various regions to a global marketplace?

Consider this analogy to highlight just how important this look and feel really is – I like eggs and toast for breakfast, as do a lot of other people. The raw contents of this breakfast are the same for everyone but preparation and layout will absolutely determine how successful breakfast is on any given day. It will determine how likely I am to recommend the meal to other people, how much satisfaction I gain from eating it, and how much value I associate with it as an everyday exercise. For the record, I like mine prepared as two eggs over hard with wheat toast cut in half on either side of the eggs, almost like a face. How many possible permutations are there? A lot.

Building dashboards at the presentation layer of a BSM solution is arguably the most important and most difficult task during any deployment, akin to making breakfast for a group of people all of whom agree that they want eggs for breakfast but can’t always articulate how they want them prepared or presented. This is exactly why in selecting a BSM vendor, it is absolutely crucial to evaluate flexibility in presenting information and also being able to change it very quickly to look like something completely different. In addition, the ability to quickly add/modify/delete the data feeds allows for new ingredients to be added to the mix so that the presentation layer can truly take on the shape that the BSM user community needs.

All this flexibility comes with its own challenges, the most significant of which is soliciting user feedback and building in mechanisms for comments, suggestions and approval from the user base. It’s one that is certainly reflected in the feature development cycle of a lot of companies, in particular ones with varying types of users. MySpace’s SVP of Product Strategy described their approach of soliciting feedback using blogs along Tom Anderson’s profile. A similar approach was described on CIO.com's blog.

These approaches can be creatively applied to building and maintaining a relevant presentation layer for a BSM solution by allowing communities of interest to provide feedback and suggestions on what they would like to see. It is then up to the administrators of the system to extract themes and concrete ideas from the feedback stream and construct new views. These should then be promoted in Beta form to further distill them, and then brought to the full user community. Sound like a BSM group inside of a larger enterprise social network? You bet.

It's not surprising to us that analyst firm Forrester has predicted that companies will spend nearly $5 billion on Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc – over the next five years. Social networking has become the next generation of knowledge management, but it is one where user adoption is driven by the end user: think Wikipedia.

Social networking has dramatically changed the media landscape in North America. Blogs enable individual consumers to change corporate behavior and have taken the limelight for breaking political news by framing election issues on cable networks. In fact, during live coverage of the presidential primaries, CNN often runs segments reviewing the latest buzz in the blogosphere.

The Economist magazine says that blogs have affected Britain differently, as most of the major news networks rather than Web savvy upstart pundits have been the dominant force However, the government in London may have been faster than its Western siblings to grasp how Web 2.0 can involve the populace in more effective policy making.

With the ability to capture knowledge, interact more closely with constituents, shape viewpoints, and ultimately influence behavior, its no wonder Forrester foresees sizable corporate investment in Web 2.0. Enterprise social networking is, in essence, $5 billion worth of industrial strength fun.

Managed Objects has been no exception. Internally, the company uses Twiki to easily and rapidly communicate about support issues, software development and generally share tribal knowledge. Externally, we’ve launched our own blog with the intent of contributing to public discourse on BSM with other blogs engaging in discussions on future directions of IT, and inviting interaction from the ITIM community, including our customers. We’ve also been quick to innovate our product line – as a long time provider of role-based dashboards, we launched myMO (my Managed Objects) last fall as a Web 2.0 front end for BSM.

And there’s more to come, we can promise that!

- Dustin

Over the past couple of years I have grown to find that there is no other combination of 4 simple letters of the alphabet that can stir as much passionate debate as these do within the world of IT. We all know better than to speak about politics and religion in mixed crowds, I add CMDB right up there with those two topics in the world of IT technologists.

ITIL carried the promise of clear, concise and standard definition….right up until you get to the CMDB. All the topics of ITIL leave room for interpretation, however, the interpretation of just what is a CMDB and just how to implement it can become a powerful debate amongst IT professionals. So much so I consider it a 4 letter word when I speak to IT professionals, until I better understand their “religion” on the topic.

Never do I consider anyone’s view of their CMDB inaccurate, each environment carries with it varying objectives, technologies and processes by which the CMDB can be delivered. I recently had articles published in The Data Center Journal and ITSMWatch.com on CMDB and several key questions often arise when I am out in the real world talking to the folks in the day-to-day trenches:

Who owns and updates the CMDB?
Simply put, everyone does – that is everyone with a vested interest and use of the CMDB. It must be considered a corporate asset and source of “information” and “data”. The more that contribute to it, the more accurate and richer it becomes.

That said, yes, there must be an organizing and policy body that sets the rules for standards to insure consistency. However, it should not restrict the free flow of update, meaning it should not force a single person to perform all updates. Policies, standards and audit notifications should drive the enforcement of standards consistency without crippling the free flow of data.

Why consider implementing?
The 4 letter word often sends shivers down the project owner’s spine, “what did I do to get tasked with this beast?”. Fair sentiment with the crossing of so many organizational barriers this task brings with it. Technology projects are never difficult (work with me on this) until they cross organizational boundaries and then the organization behaviors tend to slow down forward progress of the project.

In this case, data is just that until it is correlated and related to other bits of data turning it into information by which to take action and perform analytics for the growth of the organization. Without a mechanism by which to bring this data together, track it and provide a vehicle by which to apply the intelligence, the sheer volume of data would never expose the actionable information that leads to an agile and growing organization.

So don’t fear the CMDB, embrace the opportunity to contribute to a network of information that begins to connect the whole of the organization over time with true actionable information.

-- Michele

Long time CMP writer and veteran technology watcher Penny Crosman recently blogged about a flood of new start-ups developing solutions aimed at reducing data latency for financial institutions. For example, one provider offers “software that sits on network switch mirror ports and monitors the traffic going by, combined with correlation algorithms that, the company says, can pinpoint latency to the box level.”

While such a tool may pinpoint latency to box level, component-based management only takes you so far. The next step absolutely must be to put this information in a business context - to understand the effect of any single box’s latency on IT’s ability to deliver business services. This is important because financial institutions often have tens of thousands of servers (among other components) in their enterprise, which means potentially tens of thousands of latency alerts. Without business context, the question becomes, ‘which latent box do you fix first?’

One way would be to incorporate Business Service Management (BSM) solutions to allow IT operations to make this determination quickly and easily. BSM manages IT from a holistic, service perspective, and dynamically links the underlying IT components according to the business service they provide – so, for example, IT operations can place the latency at a box level in the context of business impact. Since BSM platforms can integrate to a range of heterogeneous IT management tools from performance monitoring to service desks, it may prove more useful than trade data latency monitoring tools.

In many ways because of their reliance on technology, financial services institutions were among the early adopters of BSM technology in the late 1990s. Today, BSM has evolved to include a range of modular components to include discovery, service level management (SLM) and the configuration management database (CMDB) or as ITIL perhaps more aptly calls it a configuration management system.

-- Jim

Doug McClure’s at it again. The former Muse-man turned Tivoli guru has posted a thoughtful seven-step program to becoming a BSM Superhero on his blog. Doug’s blog is an excellent resource on the topic of BSM – be that ITIL, CMDB, or Discovery. Though he’s a true IBM-er, his vendor-neutral approach and efforts to stimulate public discourse is commendable.

It is in that spirit of dialogue that we offer an alterative 7 step program – the “just enough” approach - just-enough being a concept popularized by Forrester Research:

1) Identify the purpose of the project

2) Choose a one or two critical applications or services

3) Model the service or services

4) Integrate federated data from asset management, service desk and other tools

5) Define rules and analyses

6) Create analytics and reporting, and

7) Define role-based views.

When a BSM is carried out in a top-down manner with a just-enough orientation in mind, design and implementation can be easier – especially when approached with a service-oriented perspective. Need 10 Tips of a Successful CMDB? Click here.

-- Greg

The consultants have been at it again. If you haven’t met them yet, strike up a conversation about a CMDB project and you’ll quickly find one interrupts. These consultants reinforce a conventional wisdom that says that building a CMDB is a linear process – with a beginning and an end – but as the saying goes, it’s the journey that’s most important. Those who endeavor on the CMDB journey should realized that the trip actually started long ago, perhaps before they even realized it and certainly before the advent of discovery tools.

Beginning a CMDB or even a BSM project with discovery is akin to drinking water from a fire hose: the data discovered is vast, often duplicative and difficult to filter, and moreover does not really identify meaningful relationships. A CMDB project is the base for creating and storing a “DNA map” of relationships between infrastructure, application and the business. To this end, the value of duplicative data for this type of project is questionable.

If not discovery, then where should the project start? My customers tell me that upwards of 70 percent of the data needed for a CMDB already exists in their enterprise. Where? It’s stored in existing IT management tools – in Service Management solutions like incident, problem and asset management. This makes existing tools a good place to start a CMDB. What’s needed isn’t more data, but rather a way to integrate existing data and rationalize relationships.

Discovery or application mapping tools are most valuable when they are used to complete the picture – to understand what has changed in the relationship structure, the configuration of each element, or if new elements have been introduced to the DNA service map. To put it another way, find out what you know about your infrastructure first by tapping data in tools like Tivoli, OpenView and BAC…later you can add discovery to find out what you don’t know.

Having just come back from the field where I spent considerable time with our customers – both in North America and in Europe – this is perhaps the single most important lesson I have learned. The most successful CMDB projects did not in fact start with discovery – they started by tapping existing data from tools they purchased and implemented years ago. Europe has discovered this important lesson and perhaps that’s a critical reason why IT management concepts seem to lead North America from across the Atlantic.

-- Siki

In a recent article in CIO Magazine, “IT departments do not deliver ‘great’ IT, say CIOs”, a survey of CIOs and IT Directors revealed that almost half do not deliver “great” IT. “Great” IT is defined by 3/4ths as being able to to add real value to the organizations strategy and bottom line.

I am always amazed when I speak to leaders of IT organizations for enterprise organizations that may know what sector of the market their organization falls into, but cannot describe to me what the business units do day-to-day and how they determine success for the business unit. I find often times I may know more by reading annual reports and surfing the company websites prior to a meeting than the IT leaders I meet within the organization. So I ask how would an IT organization believe it should have a say in strategic decision making within the organization without basic knowledge of what drives and grows the business?

Alignment to the business has almost become a passé phrase due to the lack of meat behind the initiative and the continued siloed, technology focus of many IT organizations. True alignment will only be achieved when IT organizations immerse themselves into the business and become fully integrated. A recent Information Age article quotes: “There is no such thing as an IT project: all IT’s activity should be about business projects.” The only way an IT organization can better manage change and impact is for it to be immersed and integrated in the business. This is not to suggest that IT organizations become distributed by business units, rather there are emerging roles of service managers that work side by side with the business teams on projects leveraging technology to the success of the business.

I often work with organizations on “IT projects” and the business case for an “IT project”. These are always problematic because most are “soft” in their cases of cost management. Cost saving projects that reduce hardware and software licenses are easy cases with hard savings. It’s the CMDB, SLA, ITIL process improvement, etc. projects that are difficult and I would point the finger at the root of the problem, these are typically internally, IT focused projects without links back to the business they support. I’m often looked at like I turned green and grew horns if I ask questions like, “How does this improve performance of the business? What impact on the business will this project have?”

I find ITSM (IT Service Management) projects that have a focus on managing business impacting events and can be quantified as such for business driving applications are easy cases. BSM (Business Service Management) projects that also bring in business data providing analytics regarding the effectiveness of the business providing information during the quarter versus a financial report after the fact after the quarter also have greater success. My humble advice is to always error on the side of the business and find the high impact services and understand how the technology can be better applied or improved.

IT has a difficult job in managing two sides of a coin: efficiency internally managing costs and effectiveness externally improving the business. Often times IT organizations error on what we know best, IT, but by better understanding the impact to the business and integration to the business provides the greatest benefits all the way around the business speeding up projects and decision making of projects.

– Michele

In his eye-catching article, Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard, Michael Biddick rightly indicates that “ …a CIO dashboard is one of those transformative projects that comes along only rarely and can make or break an IT organization.”

And yet, as he also points out, “If there's so much pent-up demand [for CIO Dashboards], why the lag in supply? In a word, complexity… implementation and integration will be difficult, and customization is inevitable.”

Virtually all Global 2000 companies today have acquired – through either growth or acquisition – disparate multi-vendor IT management tools for network, systems and application management – and integrating these tools together into a CIO dashboard can be very difficult, if not approached correctly, with the right technology: “The technical challenge of providing hooks into several vendors' reporting tools is huge, requiring SOAP or XML bridges.”

You see, each IT management tool creates its own data silo – consisting of availability, performance, or other IT information – and the Big 4 software vendors (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM) are very protective of their silos. As a consequence, without a number of consultants integrating, normalizing and correlating data across multiple tools from the Big 4 vendors is problematic and expensive, to say the least.

But there’s an easier way – whether you’re looking to build a CIO dashboard, or implement a CMDB, or start a BSM initiative, you should place heavy emphasis on a software vendor’s capacity to integrate your existing multi-vendor data. By selecting a vendor that takes an agnostic approach to data integration – at an API level – you gain three important advantages:
-- You can leverage your existing investments in IT management tools – no need to throw away what you already have or migrate to a single IT platform.
-- You can more quickly build the CIO dashboards your executives require – garnering you big points on the ROI curve.
-- You can build CIO dashboards that can actually interact with the IT environment – not just monitor it.
 
So, to make building your CIO dashboard a reality, be sure to select a vendor that can prove its mettle by integrating all of your existing silos of IT management data – perhaps through a proof-of-concept – only that way can you be 100% sure you’re making the right investment.

–  Dustin McNabb

CMDB standards, do they exist or not? What about the CMDBf Consortium or CIM with the DMTF? The topic of CMDB is much like discussing religion or politics, volatile and dangerous territory and I find the topic of standards in this arena as annoying as NoVA traffic.

Every so often I run into this question and discussion and I view it as nothing more than fodder because while managing IT infrastructure principally does not change from organization to organization, I have never run into two organizations with exactly the same configurations and the drivers for their CMDB projects especially when an organization is mature enough to apply the CMDB to the services of the organization. So when I’m asked this question I often respond with some of the following questions:

    -- Tell me how you plan to use the standard?
    -- What value do you expect from the standard?
    -- Are you planning to implement their model?
    -- How did you come across this standard?
    -- Are you comfortable with the members of the board?
    -- Do you know who they are?
 
I am normally greeted with the classic “deer in the headlight” stare as most folks have Googled the term or have heard of CIM and CMDBf, but do not truly understand the objectives and the value these models, standards and organizations bring to the table. I do not mean to take the wind out of your sails, but when it comes to CMDB there is no silver bullet standard or model. There are methods, models and processes to leverage (a legal word for plagerism or stealing), but they must be applied to each individual environment.

Gartner has written on the topic of the CMDBf and recommends against waiting on the CMDBf specification for communication / integration to become a standard before implementing a CMDB.  This is a consortium of vendors, but not representative of the whole of the vendor market attempting to define a standard for communication and integration of CMDB’s. I hate to ask a highly controversial question, but wouldn’t you as a consumer like to see these vendors integrate their own software products first and keep them open and able to integrate to other solutions? Just an obvious question from this humble observer.

I find the DMTF as a much more credible standard to leverage as it is a consortium of more than 4,000 active participants, representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations. The organization has been around for 15 years and is more of a defacto standards body with participation by more than a select number of vendors and includes end user organizations. However, the CIM model is still not a silver bullet in the arena of CMDB’s either. The down side is the volume of classes and relationships in the CIM model being on the magnitude of a “boil the ocean” project.

In closing I’d like to say that there are no silver bullets in terms of standards, out of the box CMDB’s, however, there are sources that can be leveraged for ideas and starting points. The CIM model is one of those with class definitions with corresponding attributes and allowable relationships. Take what makes sense in your environment and define the base model of relationships as works in your environment starting with a key application or service with high impact to the organization.

-- Michele