Man, lately it seems like a lot of stress is being poured onto conference room tables as people debate questions like
“how is ITAM different from ITIL?”
and “what the heck is a CMDB”
and “how is CMDB different from ITAM?”
and “do we really need all three…?”

I understand the reason for those qustions - enterprises need solid roadmaps to sell to management. And those are good educational questions to help stakeholders understand the tradeoffs in the roadmap.

Here’s my over-simplified, consultant-ese shorthand:

ITAM - IT Asset Management - seeks to answer a few simple questions:

“what do we own?” “where is it” “what’s it cost to acquire and maintain” and “what’s been happening to it over time?”

When you have reliable, easy-to-get answers to these questions, you can do all sorts of cool things with the data - continuous improvement of processes, stronger vendor management, better compliance (especially software, oh man is that a biggie).

BUT… it’s up to you, the IT manager, to ACT on the information. Just plugging all that data into a repository won’t gain you a whole lot.

ITIL, as you know, is a big body of best practices and a reasonably useful collection of definitions so that we can all speak the same language.

My opinion, ITIL falls short on details regarding ITAM, and especially regarding the financial management of assets (both hard $ and soft $).

On the other hand, the ITIL concept of a CMDB is really powerful and has great promise for long-term improvements in IT’s service to the enterprise. Only problem is, there’s no practical way (that I’m aware of) to build a true CMDB today. We’re not far off though - several vendors are rolling out products now.

But really, I think a better question would be “what are the key business value opportunities in IT Operations, and how can we best exploit them for short and long-term gain?”

More on that topic later.

-Scott B

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