CMDB

Net.works and Evergreen are merging!!

Well this is very big news for us.  You often hear of mergers of equals, and you don’t believe it.  Well you can believe this.  Both companies are the same size and are in highly complementary market spaces.  

Both company names have strong brand equity within the HP customer and partner community, but the executives of both companies decided to trade as Evergreen Systems given its stronger brand recognition in the market at large (marketing dollars and blogs at work).  But the real question is…what value does this bring to you, our customers? 

To answer that let’s look at what is happening in IT operations.  For many organizations, ITIL principles are well on the way to being adopted, and a strong focus / desire exists to run as IT as one organization, not many distinct silos.  This focus on IT service management / delivery across IT has led to an uptick in technology buying to enable the new enterprise processes.  

But still, improvement is often slow and hard to measure.  Why?  We have service catalogs to streamline IT services ordering but executing those orders is still difficult.  We have improved change process management but executing those changes end to end is still laborious and largely manual.  We have the same detailed actions occurring in every IT silos thousands of times each year, and yet these actions are sill largely manual.  We are trying to respond from request to outcome—and yet we still have not done simple business process re-engineering from start to finish on repetitive requests.  

It is time for another big leap.  It is time to dig into the high volume processes underneath ITIL best practices, re-engineer them, and truly automate them end to end.  We must put the work into the technology. 

Our merger powers this idea.  Evergreen brings the ITIL experience, the process re-engineering, the IT service management experience, the service catalog (demand management), and the change management.   Net.works joins us at change management, bringing the configuration management experience, the end client management and automation, and the data center (server) management and “run book” automation.

Together we believe we can truly lead our clients to measurable, quantum leaps in productivity, agility, accuracy, proactivity, compliance, security, and quality—along with a significant reduction in risk.  

So how about…Let’s Automate!  Its now time.   

Don Casson

CEO Evergreen Systems, Inc.

We hear a lot of talk these days about KPAs and ITIL process areas. KPAs (Key Process Areas) are used to help develop and measure the benchmarked standards of ITIL and are a good way of measuring your organization’s ‘maturity’ level within an ITIL process area (such as Configuration Management

KPAs apply to a repeatable maturity level. In the Infrastructure Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a repeatable maturity level means that the most important processes have been introduced and the effective structure of the IT process in question is predictable, and the provision of its IT-related services is repeatable.

So what about KPAs associated with Configuration Management?

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So you’ve thought things through now and you think you’re ready to begin working on a CMDB. Whether your motives are centralized change management control, the need for a standard set of configuration items or just improved change governance – you know the organization needs it.

The next question is where to start. As the white rabbit told Alice in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – “I’ve always found it’s helpful to start at the beginning.”

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Last blog I talked about CMDB and its relationship to overall Service Level Management. What about is relationship to ITAM and Asset Management?

Oftentimes enterprises believe that if they have an asset management database, they also have a CMDB database. There is a fundamental difference and an important link.

IT Asset Management is the discipline of managing finances, contracts and usage of IT assets throughout their lifecycles for the purpose of maintaining an optimal balance between business service requirements, total costs, budget predictability and contractual and regulatory compliance. ITAM activities include the management of inventory, software licenses, vendors, procurement, leases, warranties, cost accounting, retirement and disposal.

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In my last blog I laid out the proposition that Configuration Management and a CMDB is all about Change and that CMDB and Change are ‘partners’ in executing the work of IT efficiently and accurately. Seems pretty clear, right? Then it should be easy to justify and implement a CMDB based on large numbers of Changes, right again?

Not necessarily. Justifying, developing and implementing a CMDB is not an isolated activity, a technology implementation or a database development effort. A CMDB is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and the end(s) are increased ITIL best practice Change Management and control and increased Configuration and Release Management control.

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Is the business value of a CMDB all about Change Control? And what if your organization performs root cause analysis? Do you really need a CMDB? We’ll address these and other CMDB, Change and Configuration Management issues in a new series of blogs this month.

As enterprises and their IT support organizations grow, their infrastructures become increasingly fragmented and spread across a variety of functions, technologies and organizations. As this IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ continues, efficiency, optimization and overall control over IT resources suffers. Organizations often address the IT infrastructure ‘sprawl’ issue with automated or, in some cases manual, Change ‘root cause’ analysis tools. These tools analyze changes, in many cases failed changes, to get at the ‘root cause’ of the problem.

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ITIL introduced the CMDB several years ago yet many are confused about its purpose. Do you think you know what a CMDB really is, as well as it’s purposes, components and applications? Test your CMDB knowledge against these five very common misconceptions about the CMDB.

The common misconceptions detailed here include:

• A CMDB is just a database
• A CMDB enables ITIL
• CMDB is just a part of Change Management
• My Asset Management system is the same as a CMDB
• Federation is the key to CMDB

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1. Improved overall release, change and configuration management through bringing all configuration items and transactions under centralized change and configuration management control.
2. Automated discovery and mapping of all key applications, computing and network IT infrastructure.

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Okay, so last time we had a chance to chat, I made the statement that running CMDB and Service Catalog projects can increase the acceptance of operating in a service-oriented fashion. If you recall, my reasoning was largely due to how foreign a service concept is to IT. So I proposed that by building a data model that integrates the service catalog and CMDB, one can establish a familiar reference point for IT which brings the adoption rate into acceptable portions.

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So what’s up? How are things going? I hope everyone had a good holiday full of quality family time and turkey. Such is life-all holidays must come to end, and we all have to get back to work.

So when last we chatted, we were discussing some benefits of undertaking a strategy to construct a service catalog and CMDB in a joint effort. The first benefit that I mentioned was the ability to identify the composition of a service, which includes Hardware, Software, Manpower Governance, Standards, etc. Let me elaborate. One of the biggest challenges for IT is to gain a universal understanding of what a service is. You might laugh but a common reaction when first trying to define a service is skepticism and uncertainty. A common feeling is that if the item can not be shoved in a rack or is not the latest flashy piece of technology, it is worthless or a waste of money. The reality is that IT functions in the realm of the tangible. So there is not the typical warm-heart welcome when someone brings up the concept of a ’service’.

So how does one get around this?

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