Will the real CMDB please stand up? I don’t know about you but I am completely confused. What on earth is this thing called a CMDB? Is this some sort of new type of database product that will allow executives to have a life changing experience and allow them profound visibility into their organizations inner workings? Is this just some hyped up new techno vernacular that will be gone in six months so everyone should just ignore it? Whatever it is, I don’t think anyone would argue that the IT industry is a buzz talking, pushing, and promoting the CMDB as if it is the Holy Grail. So, what is a CMDB and why should one spend the time and effort to understand a CMDB?

Well Okay, here it goes- The reality is a CMDB means different things to different organizations. A common approach to a CMDB is that it is a conceptual idea which is made up of both physical and logical elements. In its normalized form a CMDB needs to be comprised of multiple layers and enterprise sources that allow an organization visibility into the relationships that make up its environment.

The reason for this structure is largely due to the environment which a CMDB is employed. A majority of organizations operate in a distributed environment which is comprised of either multiple grass roots or COTS enterprise solutions. This complexity is caused by a reluctance to organizational change and measuring political power by product ownership. Consequently, most organizations do not leverage a single enterprise solution across the organization. As a result, solutions are forced to operate within an organizational silo to avoid organizational conflict.

So within this context a CMDB needs to be structured across a complex distributed environment where each silo can provide a subset of the data. This data can then be leveraged to establish the linkage between sources and derive the metadata to gain a detail view of an organization. Rendering the metadata in a multiple dimension logical view provides a presentation layer to the end user and allows a higher degree of insight.

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Summer vacations are over for most of us, so it’s back to work! I had a call yesterday with some analysts at AMR, and it was a very interesting exchange. Here is one of the interesting topic areas of the talk.

Sarbanes Oxley 404 Compliance. We agreed that way too much focus is being applied to tools / approaches to automating the audit of compliance, and not enough attention is being paid to eliminating the source of non compliance.

As a CPA and former auditor, the best approach to creating effective compliance (conformance) is to eliminate the root cause of the problem–which is almost always poor policy and process execution across IT.

IT is very fluid, dynamic, and incredibly complex. Establishing a “policy” and audit checkpoints for compliance, without automating the processes is an exercise in frustration. Who will comply? How will you get them to adopt the new processes? What happens to them if they don’t? How will the policy and processes be kept current as the organization, workers, technology, market, and regulatory requirements move around? How much no going work will all this require? Should anyone be surprised that year 2 of Sarbanes is projected to be more expensive than year 1? Just thinking about this gives me a headache.

Let’s elevate our thinking. We have lots of stuff to comply with, and more will come along. That stuff will continue to change–and each requirement will have some body of policy to comply with. This includes external compliance drivers like Sarbanes, but key internal drivers as well such as enterprise architecture, security, and the IT governance model.

There is a better way. You can automate compliance, get rapid adoption of policy changes, and improve IT wide efficiency all at the same time. How? By automating the work of IT, and including policy compliance adherence as a normal step at the start of the workflows.

Here’s how we helped one client– a global 2000 retailer, do just that by leveraging an enterprise wide ITIL change management approach (with the technology they already owned). They wanted to improve IT efficiency AND automate Sarbanes 404 compliance. We turned to CoBIT and ITIL as logical, de facto standards for guidance, distilled a policy set of what mattered most to the client, and eliminated redundancies to yield a simplified process framework. We then brought the policy to life by updating processes to reflect changes, and automated the processes with technology–driving the IT organization to 100% adoption of the new policy in two weeks–a major cultural change! We drove efficiency by empowering those requesting changes to self service, and created an automated risk / materiality calculator to route proposed changes accordingly.

The Business Value of IT? The customer went from less than 20% policy compliance to 100% in two weeks, and got a 30% efficiency gain in processing changes across IT. Even more, accuracy, agility, and quality have improved as well, while business continuity risks have significantly fallen.

As always, there is astounding value in getting IT to work as one unit end to end, but most organizations still don’t realize that their enterprise approaches to delivering the products and services of IT are really only silo to silo hand offs with their individual homegrown processes and data sources, with no high level visibility, no baselines, no common understanding, terrible inefficiency, and no ability to consistently improve and adapt.

But, every day, a few more get it. Keep the faith!

Don Casson

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Here is what has happened on Evergreen’s Blog for this Week:

• The Power of Integration
• Recent Questions on ITIL, Part 2
• Podcast Series on Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment

The Top 10 Post on Evergreen’s Blogs:

1. Continuing our tale of Configuration Management …
2. Recent Questions on ITIL, Part 2
3. This just in …. We need a framework.
4. Can ITIL Help Reduce IT Headcount?
5. Does It Make Sense to Chargeback for IT Services?
6. Finally, real hard-dollar ROI for Software License Management
7. Podcast Series on Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment
8. When it Comes to an Active CMDB … Don’t Believe the Hype!
9. Many Say They Are “ITIL-Ready”—What We Think It Means
10. PO - Planning and Organization - PO1 - Define a Strategic IT Plan

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A Five-Part Podcast Series on Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment

I recently completed a comprehensive analysis of the results of Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment. We conduct this informal survey two times per year with attendees at key industry events. This most recent survey took place at the 9th annual International Service Management Conference hosted by Pink Elephant.

While our survey isn’t by any means scientific, I think it provides an excellent “gut check” that keeps us up-to-date about the level of activity in large, complex IT organizations around process frameworks like ITIL and CoBIT.

Part 1: Many Say They Are “ITIL-Ready”—What We Think It Means

Our findings are based on the feedback we received from over 100 senior managers and executives representing more than 70 companies, organizations and institutions. Of course, our perspective is shaped by more than seven years of experience as an IT process consulting firm that has worked with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies to help their IT organizations work more efficiently.

Part 2: So, What’s Really Taking Place in IT organizations today?

This session provides an overview of the key projects that our survey
respondents have under way, including enterprise-wide incident and
problem management systems and IT business services catalogs. I also
discuss why I believe many are putting the cart before the horse in
designing their service level management approach before building a
true customer-oriented IT service catalog.

Part 3: IT “Firefighting” Saves the Day! … at the Expense of Enterprise Process Efficiency

Sixty-seven percent of our survey respondents said they have an enterprise-level change management policy. While we find that enterprise change management goes across the enterprise, instead of being a common system it is all-too-often a patchwork quilt of individual homegrown processes handed off from IT silo to IT silo. In this podcast, I provide an overview of the key components of an effective change management program. I also discuss how a culture of “firefighting” effects change management policy and process discipline.

Part 4: In Matters of Compliance, ITIL and CoBIT are Only Parts of a Broader Solution

Most of the market still sees ITIL and CoBIT as point solutions applied to fix specific problems, with ITIL as a Help Desk improvement activity and CoBIT as an audit review checklist to assess Sarbanes Oxley compliance. In this podcast, we analyze the value potential of viewing ITIL and CoBIT as part of a broader system that rests on a flexible framework of process and governance best practices and standards (both internal and external).

Part 5: When it Comes to an Active CMDB … Don’t Believe the Hype!

Today, the CMBD is being hotly hyped in the marketplace. The risk is that the market hype will undersell the complexity of articulating a true CMDB, and the challenges of getting the IT enterprise to design and support the federated model required. In this final podcast in the five-part series, we dig into the details of what it takes to create a true, active CMDB and how you can manage the mounting market hype in your organization.

Additional Links

• Get results of Evergreen’s North American ITIL Maturity Assessment.
• Download the free white paper, North American ITIL Assessment; an In-depth Analysis of the Current State and Readiness of IT Organizations to Adopt ITIL-Based Processes
• Register to participate in Evergreen’s next North American ITIL Assessment starting Sept. 19
• Visit www.evergreensys.com

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In our last episode of Real World ITIL, we were pleased to note that eWeek magazine covered Evergreen’s recent survey on ITIL adoption. This week, we’re equally pleased to note that CIO Insight magazine has also covered the survey’s interesting findings. We’re appreciative of this coverage and hope you’ll check out the articles. If you do, we’d love to hear your thoughts on them! Just click on the Comment link below to respond.

This week, as promised, we’ll feature another bunch of questions that we’ve recently heard about ITIL. I’ll offer a few brief thoughts in reply to each of these questions, but I invite any reader out there to add additional insight or perspective by clicking on the Comment link, below.

So let’s make sure our seat backs are straight up, tray tables are stowed and our seat belts are fastened (and turn off that Blackberry!). Here we go:

Question: How can you develop and advertise a Service Catalog if you can’t guarantee delivery or cost?

This question came from a shop in Tennessee which is thinking about implementing ITIL but hasn’t yet formally decided to make the leap. Insightful questions like this one are indicators that ‘ITIL consciousness’ is beginning to register in the minds of some traditional IT veterans. Clearly, the guy who asked it understands how actions in one process box of the framework can influence activities in other areas of the framework.

We believe that developing a catalog of standard services is a great way to start introducing ITIL into your shop. Like a CMDB, a well-constructed Service Catalog is a foundational element for many other aspects of ITIL - especially in the areas of Service Level Management, Financial Management, Capacity Management and Availability Management. You can read the ITIL documentation to understand why, so I won’t repeat that info here.

However, a Catalog is a handy thing to have even if you’re not doing ITIL at all. A key consideration in controlling IT cost is to ensure that you are neither overprovisioning nor underprovisioning services compared to the actual IS needs of the business. It should be obvious that to make this determination IT executives first need to know with some precision what products their division is actually offering to the business and then make value judgments accordingly.

So, a catalog is well worth creating even if it’s got some gaps in the logic. You can always evolve it iteratively into a more comprehensive tool later (for chargeback and availability negotiations, foe example). If you can link the catalog that you develop to other Service Delivery processes, then that’s well and good too.

Nevertheless, we recommend that your team invest the effort in creating a service catalog if you don’t have one, because even the effort itself will teach you something you didn’t know about your own IT department. Just remember to consider IT from a holistic SERVICE or PRODUCT point-of-view - as opposed to a functional or component view. If the distinction between these perspectives isn’t clear, pop us a Comment and we’ll clarify.

Question: Most IT shops seem to start ITIL implementations with some form of Configuration Management or CMDB effort. Why not start with Service Level Management instead?

All too often, those of us who work in infrastructure areas take an insular point-of-view - one that forgets who IT really serves, how IT gets paid-for, and what factors can lead to IT functions getting outsourced. This question, from an IT veteran at a shop in Kentucky, belies his understanding about who butters his daily bread.

Configuration Management is attractive because it’s not hard for any IT manager to understand why having a concise, accurate list of IT assets is a great thing to have. Considering the financial implications alone of minimizing service fees, maintenance fees, property tax, warranty expirations, and license fees, etc., the logic of tracking Configuration Items is self-evident.

Also, it usually isn’t difficult for IT managers to understand the value of linking Change, Release, Incident and Known Error records to CIs. (I would be willing, though, to bet that few IT managers have really witnessed the true power of this concept, yet!) So, if your department has limited time and staff (and especially if your organizational culture tends to oppose change), Configuration Management can seem like low-risk, low-hanging fruit that’s not going to get any manager fired for trying to do it.

But this reasoning doesn’t automatically imply that CM is either the best or the only place to start with ITIL. Service Level Management and Financial Management both make excellent starting points as well, particularly from the perspective of the CIO’s office.

After all, there’s a lot more to IT than just Configuration Items. If you’re an IT executive and you’ve got continual budget pressure or you’re attempting to fix damaged relationships with your customer community, or you’re trying to figure out whether your IT is offering the right mix of services, you should seriously consider implementing Service Level Management and Financial Management early on in your ITIL adoption. The concepts in these processes can help tremendously with all of these issues. Call us if you’d like to learn more.

Question: Does a credible industry best-practice exist on what percentage of our infrastructure staff should be allocated to each ITIL process?

Wouldn’t you love to have the answer to this one? So would we, truth be told. Since time has run out for this week, we’ll take a bold swing at this question in our next installment of Real World ITIL.

Aren’t these fantastic questions, though? They came from smart folks, who are dedicated to improving their company’s IT somehow, and suspect that ITIL could point the way if only they could understand it a bit better. If we assume that the best learning experiences begin by asking great questions, it’s apparent from these that some IT folks out there are going to get a lot of benefit from their enquiries.

For my own part, the more I learn about ITIL, the more I realize just how powerful and useful a model it really is. As a result of my recent experiences, it’s very clear to me that it’s well worth using ITIL language to talk about your company’s IT even if you’re not actually implementing the framework for production purposes. The process alone of working to understand ITIL can teach you important things about your IT even if you don’t want to put the effort into transforming your processes just now.

So keep up the great thinking, everyone, and please take time to share some of it with your fellow readers here on Real World ITIL. We’ll have a few more questions next episode.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

Technorati Tags: itil it infrastructure library information technology infrastructure library itsmf cmdb itsm consultingprince2 itsm helpdesk software

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Part Five of a Five-Part Podcast Series on Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment

Today, the CMBD is being hotly hyped in the marketplace. The risk is that the market hype will undersell the complexity of articulating a true CMDB, and the challenges of getting the IT enterprise to design and support the federated model required. In this final podcast in the five-part series, we dig into the details of what it takes to create a true, active CMDB and how you can manage the mounting market hype in your organization.

Additional Links:

• Get results of Evergreen’s North American ITIL Maturity Assessment.
• Download the free white paper, North American ITIL Assessment; an In-depth Analysis of the Current State and Readiness of IT Organizations to Adopt ITIL-Based Processes
• Register to participate in Evergreen?s next North American ITIL Assessment starting Sept. 19
• Visit www.evergreensys.com

—–

Here is what has happened on Evergreen’s Blog for this Week:

• ITIL Podcasting!!
• Many Say They Are “ITIL-Ready”—What We Think It Means
• So, What’s Really Taking Place in IT organizations today?
• Continuing our tale of Configuration Management …
• IT “Firefighting” Saves the Day! … at the Expense of Enterprise Process Efficiency
• What are they turning to?
• Results of recent ITIL Adoption survey by Evergreen
• So, what exactly ARE “ITAM Best Practices” anyway?
• This just in …. We need a framework.
• What, Where, and How Much?
• In Matters of Compliance, ITIL and CoBIT are Only Parts of a Broader Solution
• When it Comes to an Active CMDB … Don’t Believe the Hype!

The Top 10 Post on Evergreen’s Blogs:

1. ITIL process improvement: it’s about people, mostly.
2. Implementing IT Change Management Program
3. PO - Planning and Organization - PO1 - Define a Strategic IT Plan
4. Does It Make Sense to Chargeback for IT Services?
5. Finally, real hard-dollar ROI for Software License Management
6. Can ITIL Help Reduce IT Headcount?
7. Many Say They Are “ITIL-Ready”—What We Think It Means
8. Results of recent ITIL Adoption survey by Evergreen
9. Example of an IT Change Management Policies and procedures Guide
10. A really key element of why projects fail

—–

I am currently working on a project where the organization is initiating a project to improve their web based customer request system. They refer to this application as WebRFA (Request for Assistance) and it provides a portal for requesting various products and services. This customer happens to be a government organization supporting high profile internal customers, and customer service is of the highest importance. While the current WebRFA application provides a decent customer interface for submitting requests a significant amount of manual processes must take place subsequent to the request being submitted before it is fulfilled. Requests coming into the current portal are manually entered into multiple different work management systems depending on the request type. More complex requests require a significant amount of customer contact for clarification subsequent to the request being submitted. While the process to submit a request is relatively easy for the customer, the process to fulfill the request is often very cumbersome for the service providers, resulting in inefficiencies and excessive costs.

The objectives of the improvement project are to develop an improved WebRFA system that simplifies the request submission process, while yielding more specific information for the service providers, and at the same time reducing manual efforts to fulfill the requests. As most organizations realize this is quite a challenge as improvements to customer service often result in increased costs. One way to improve customer service while at the same time reducing costs is through ?The Power of Integration?

In this particular case the customer is planning to tackle one of the more complex requests first as the current process is very labor intensive and often requires significant customer contact after the request is received. This obviously ties up the time of both the service provider and the customer and costs money. The process this customer has chosen to address first is the process for requesting and issuing mobile devices, and related services and accessories. This organization issues thousands of these devices annually. The complexity lies in the multitude of options for mobile devices and the fact that issuing these devices results in updates to both their asset management system and their service management systems, not to mention the WebRFA application. Gathering specific mobile device data and options is currently very manual as the WebRFA application does not contain a catalog. Additionally, asset management and service management data is updated manually upon delivery of the devices.

It was clear to the customer and me as a consultant that the best way to improve service while reducing cost was to automate. Additionally, we realized that some existing systems have inherent capabilities that could be leveraged. Through integration certain capabilities could be leveraged and certain processes could be automated to both improve customer service and reduce cost. So here?s what is planned ? it?s still a work in progress.

The WebRFA application will be improved to provide a catalog and mobile device request process that steps customers through selecting mobile phones and/or Blackberries, and based on the selection provides options (service plans, batteries, hands-free units, etc?) that are compatible with the selected phone or Blackberry. This will significantly reduce callbacks to the customer to manually gather this specific product data. Rather than develop a catalog structure from scratch to hold the product information the WebRFA application will leverage an existing catalog structure inherent to the organization?s asset management application.

Integration between the WebRFA application, the service management application and the asset management application will generate a Change record and a Work Order in the service and asset management databases respectively upon approval of the request. The Change record will initiate the configuration and installation of the assets being issued from stock, and the Work Order in the asset management application will contain data on the assets being issued, and will update the asset data upon fulfillment of the change. Existing integration between the asset management and service management systems exchange asset data between each and provide the capability to automate the process end to end with significantly less manual effort. Going forward maintaining the product catalog will be the most significant non-automated task, and future integration to electronic vendor catalogs could reduce that as well.

This example demonstrates how service management, change management and configuration management are closely linked, and also underlines the benefits of integrating the various systems that control these processes. Additional benefits result when there are problems with these assets since the service and asset systems are already integrated.

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Hey, everyone! It’s time to continue our travelogue (travelblog?) through ITIL here on Real World ITIL. Welcome back.

Outside right now, the weather folks say that it feels like 110 degrees when you combine the temperature and humidity. It’s really much too hot and humid in our part of the country to do much else but write a blog entry. That’s something I can do while relaxing in the comfort of air conditioning - or at least would be were there not a power outage at my house right now. Thank goodness the ol’ laptop battery has a good charge on it. Let’s hope the A/C comes back on soon!

In any event, I hope that it’s cooler wherever you are reading this from.

Before we get started this time,

let’s acknowledge Don Casson for another intriguing comment on our last blog entry on whether ITIL can help reduce headcount in which he cites some interesting statistics. Thanks again, Don! He will be releasing a new series of podcasts on IT strategy soon, so check them out elsewhere on this website.

This week, let’s take a break from addressing recent questions about ITIL in favor of providing an update on the configuration management implementation project we’ve been following for a while. We’ll get back to answering questions later this week.

After a few months of effort, we’ve completed the process and technology design and now it’s time to get building the beast. The technology team has begun coding the interfaces between Peregrine’s AssetCenter product and other legacy systems, as well as other essential technical work.

The technical team is also about to host data cleansing workshops with the end-users, whom we?ll enlist to help out with that essential chore. After all, we don’t want to put suspect data into our nascent CMDB. And who better to cleanse the legacy asset data than the folks who will have to use it to get their jobs done every day?

On the process side of the project, the team has finalized what we call the ‘core asset management process’ - the centralized ITIL-based workflow for Requests, Receiving, Installation, Moving, Adding and Changing asset records. This process design is an essential building block for ITIL Configuration Management, because it will eventually mature into a human system that will help ensure the accuracy over the long term of the configuration information in the CMDB.

Also in process, a format has been created for the detailed procedure tables that we’ll need for the end-user adoption process. One table will be completed for each block on the core asset management flowchart - a perhaps tedious but necessary job. Building these tables is a key component of an ITIL transformation because they will be the main tool we use to teach the new, ITIL-based way of doing their jobs as opposed to whatever they were doing before.

This is a good moment in the story to recall our official Real World ITIL motto: Remember the Obvious! For example:

When doing this yourself at home, don’t forget at this point to re-verify one last time that the process design you built actually satisfies the business requirements that you gathered at the beginning of the project. It would be a major bummer to go to all the effort of building procedure tables for a process that doesn’t do what the business needs it to do, wouldn’t it?

We’re also starting to launch an internal marketing plan to help the larger asset management community at this company understand and (we hope) adopt the new system and work habits. I’ll have to see if I can get one of my blogmates to write a missive on this important topic sometime.

Suffice to say, running an effective marketing and user adoption plan is essential to the success of any ITIL implementation. If you don’t have one for your project, I heartily recommend that you give it serious consideration.

However, having a good technical design, a solid workflow and an effective marketing plan isn’t enough to get the job done. We also need to ensure that the process design and technology platform connect in a rational and easy-to-use way. After all, a great process is no good if the end-users don’t know when and how to use the technology platform to get their jobs done.

Accomplishing this level of understanding will require another set of workshops with users to walk through workflow, tool usage, screen design and reporting needs as one holistic system. You can imagine that the build teams will be taking careful notes all along the way in these meetings. They will need all of this information to come together seamlessly in order to build the whole beast and get into the system test phase.

Ultimately, the success of this project is going to come down to whether this company has the leadership willpower, the vision and the budget necessary to fully realize the business benefits they will receive from the implementation. We’re certain that in the end they will be glad they did this whole thing - if only they can see this initial implementation all the way through to the end. We’ll see how it goes and in the meantime wish the whole team good luck on the build!

Then, of course, they’ll have to conquer the next major pieces on the way to a successful implementation of ITIL Configuration Management: software asset management and the practice of configuration management itself. We hope that will be a story for another time.

For now, though, Real World ITIL will move on to tell other tales. If the process gods are willing, we?ll rejoin this project in a couple of months to see how the build phase went.

Have a great week, everyone! See you back here soon.

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

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Part Three of a Five-Part Podcast Series on Evergreen’s North American ITIL Assessment

Sixty-seven percent of our survey respondents said they have an enterprise-level change management policy. While we find that enterprise change management goes across the enterprise, instead of being a common system it is all-too-often a patchwork quilt of individual homegrown processes handed off from IT silo to IT silo. In this podcast, I provide an overview of the key components of an effective change management program. I also discuss how a culture of ‘firefighting’ effects change management policy and process discipline.

Additional Links

• Get results of Evergreen’s North American ITIL Maturity Assessment.
• Download the free white paper, North American ITIL Assessment¾an In-depth Analysis of the Current State and Readiness of IT Organizations to Adopt ITIL-Based Processes
• Register to participate in Evergreen’s next North American ITIL Assessment starting Sept. 19
• Visit www.evergreensys.com

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