Tag Archive | "Configuration"

Top 10 reasons a CMDB implementation fails

Tags: Best Practices, Business Service Management, Change, CMDB, CMS, Configuration, ITIL, ITSM, Trends


Below are some of the common reasons that CMDB implementations fail.   They are in no particular order.

Lack of Management Buy-in

Face it, one group is going to be the buyer and installer of the CMDB, there are many other groups/departments that will be needed to help maintain the data as well as use the data.  If there is no edict to leverage ITIL processes, there is a good chance that the CMDB project will fail or more accurately… not get used.

Owner of CI’s do not have easy access

I’ve seen several times that the change management team/group are the buyer/install/owner of the CMDB.   There is nothing wrong with that, the problem comes in that they do not have buy in from the CI owners to help maintain (or validate) the CI’s, or the CMDB solution is cumbersome and it is implemented in a manner that makes it hard for the CI’s to be maintained.  The Change Management team doesn’t want to own the CI’s (and can’t/shouldn’t), but the owners are not able to easily access the CMDB.

Garbage in, garbage out (and/or stale data)

There are lots of sources of data to populate and maintain the CMDB, exporting XML from one system and importing into another system is only part of the process of ensuring data accuracy.  XML exports are not the only ways to integrate with other sources also.   Make sure the vendor has ways to filter out noise (who cares about an SSH session from an admin workstation to the server, it’s not a dependency).  If the there is to much data, it may be hard to find anything, if there is inaccurate data, no one will trust the CMDB.  Find the middle ground.

Lack of third party Integration

There are many reasons to connect to the products to pull in additional details.  You can think of some of these applications like mini silo CMDB’s.  The HelpDesk system knows anything and everything about customers, the asset system knows tons-o-things about servers.  Integrating with different sources is a great way to get started as well as ongoing maintenance of a CMDB.

100% or NOTHING

Do not fall into the trap of holding back releasing the CMDB to the company until it is completely done.   I understand that there needs to be a certain level of data witin the system before there is value, I understand that there needs to be processes in place to maintain the data and then there is the accuracy challenges.  The point is, pick a few slices of the entire pie, define what it is, set the expectations, roll it out, get some internal wins (and learn from it), then go after a few more slices of the pie.

Hard to search/find things

The interface must be intuitive, the end users shouldn’t have to understand a database schema in order to search for CI’s.   Many of the users will only log into the CMDB a few times a year.  A user should be able to hit some internal website, get forwarded to the CMDB interface, issue a search, press print and run off to their DR planning meeting (or Solaris migration project, etc).

Over designed/engineered Schema

For those doing a roll-your-own CMDB, good for you, it is nice that you are spending time to design the database schema and planning for the future… don’t get stuck planning for 2020, your plans for the CMDB and schema WILL NOT BE ACCURATE, accept it.

One Stop Shopping

We are looking for a CMDB, this is a good time to purchase a new Change Management System, Problem, Help, etc, etc, etc…. and you have just delayed purchasing and rolling out anything for the next 18  – 24 months between the pilots and lengthy executive signoffs due to costs and implementation time frame.   Again, good idea, they need to work together in harmony, you need a plan, you need interoperability, but you also need to solve some business problems sooner.

Bottom Up = WRONG approach

If you’ve ever talked to the builders or owners of a CMDB, many times it quickly gets down into the weeds of attributes, relationships, types of CI’s.  This is all interesting information and details but… who cares.   In the end, who is the target audience, what is it that they will need to get out of the CMDB.  Take a top down approach to the implementation.  If you have a clear vision (or atleast a goal of a vision), in turn it can clearly define the types of CI’s you will initially need, potentially the specific attributes and dependency information.   It probably help you determine what types of integrations the CMBD might need with other system in order to populate and maintain the CI’s.  If you take a bottom up approach for the implementation of the CMDB, you will get stuck in the weeds and you may not have a clear answer if the design/approach/solution/product/etc will meet the end users vision/goals.

Okay, for those of you not counting, I only listed 9, in the comments below… give me your 10th one.  Don’t be shy, share a 10th one or a funny story about one.

Tobin

Midsized Co’s Behind Lg Ent’s in Aligning IT to Business–NetworkWorld

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Configuration, Forrester, IT Management Tools, NetworkWorld, Performance


The Hub Commentary __

Beth’s opening statement regarding the Aberdeen findings sums it up, mid size organizations are under performing larger organizations.  Pick up the Fortune 500 list as I do each year and look at the top 5 in each industry.  There are 3 things that always standout:

  1. Those that lead, know how to harness the commodity of technology to not only power, but drive business.
  2. Those that lead, lead by magnitudes greater than their followers.
  3. Those that innovate, change how a market functions, don’t always stay on top.  Check out where eBay is for example.  The innovator often gets leapfrogged.

Beth references a previous article my good friend Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester is quoted offering the following 5 pieces of advice:

  1. Consolidate management tools
  2. Invest in Network Change and Config Mgmt
  3. Application awareness
  4. Pay for analysis, not monitoring
  5. Get more from existing tools

2011 will be the year IT transforms to measure business performance and ties the analytics to the data to drive business performance, not IT or technology performance.  Use technology for the mundane and routine, measure performance, reduce costs, do more with less and measuring the network and application performance regardless of where it resides will be key to having that complete view of business performance to use technology to improve that performance in clever ways.

Michele

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If you’re overseeing performance management initiatives at a midsized organization — one with annual revenue between $50 million and $500 million — then you probably have a thing or two to learn from your counterparts at larger enterprises.  (Read Full Article …)

Tomorrow’s forecast… cloudy

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Configuration, IT Management, Service Level, Virtualization


To cloud or not the cloud, that is the question .  Todays IT needs to be agile and responsive to their customer, most of the time the customer is internal and they need more processing power added to existing services or the need new services provisioned.   There is also a high expectation that change within the enterprise is done in a safe manner to avoid future outages.   Managing the enterprise from a Service perspective, understanding the individuals parts that make up the entire service is a fundamental requirement.

One of the ways for IT to be able to quickly grow or shrink the footprint of the services is to adopt virtualization and build an internal cloud and/or leverage outside cloud providers.  Virtualizing is a way to have well known configurations rolled into production and in turn reduce risks to outages.  Virtualizing also provides a type of Disaster Recovery (DR) it also provides a way to add more nodes to an overtaxed cluster quickly.   I’m not saying virtualization is for everyone, but there are many value-adds it brings to IT as well as value to the business.

Tobin

Five Lessons Learned from 2010 Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) Radar – EMA Blogs

Tags: ADDM, Business Service Management, Change, Configuration, Data Center Moves, Discovery, EMA


One of the most interesting elements of any research project is to have the opportunity to speak with those in the IT “front lines” dealing with the challenges of the moment.  (read more…)

BSM Stories from the Trenches — Tale of the CMDB

Tags: Business Service Management, CMDB, CMS, Configuration


Tale of Customer Service, Cost of Service Impact, Mitigation of Risk and the CMDB Heart!

This is a story about a manufacturer, a retail buyer and the consumer and how IT management touches them all. This is the first in a series of Business Service Management (BSM) Stories from the Trenches that I’ll post describing the benefits of a single-pain-of-glass (I did mean the pain of glass!) and management of complex infrastructures as services to the business and the customer driving revenue and growth.

The Set-up . . . . .

One day a CIO receives a call from a friend, another CIO, but a customer, a big customer. The conversation quickly turns to “how come we are having difficulty placing orders with you? Should we buy from someone else?”. What’s going on…..

* Each hour we process >$100,000 worth of orders
* We experienced ~60+ hours of server down time last year
* $6M in orders have been impacted by the down time

How are we going to improve the availability and quality of the customer experience and reduce costs in a very heterogeneous, complex environment?

The Solution . . . . .

We need to know what we have and what it does in order to better measure quality and service levels. This requires 5 things:

* Define what are our services, prioritize them and align to business priorities
* Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that is a intelligent model of the infrastructure
* “Live”, single-pane-of-glass bringing life to the intelligent model of the infrastructure
* Governance over the model to ensure it is accurate and in compliance with approved changes
* Automated Service Level measurements, live and historical trends

We have monitoring in place, but we do not have a way to pull it together and marry it in a meaningful way to the infrastructure and we need to create a Service View of the infrastructure. This will require a lot of integration to meet the “live” requirement so that we can take action in real time and avert service impacting events in the future and govern that the model remains accurate and ultimately automate our service level measuring and reporting.

This is where Novell’s Business Service Management came in to integrate, build the intelligent service models, automate the model building and governance and provide the service level dashboard.

The Benefits . . . . .

* Service Level reporting is manual and costly, now that has been automated – approx 2 FTEs 5 Days each
* >25% service quality improvement with “live” service monitoring and averted service impacting events
* BONUS: Discovered >25% of logins were failing leading to a customer satisfaction challenge when placing orders that was corrected

The Intelligent Service Model and the automation’s improved customer satisfaction, quality of service, averted service impacting events and controlled costs. This is not an uncommon story for customers of the Novell Business Service Management solution. The heart of the solution is the “live” integration and intelligent service model making sense and relating bits of disparate data as super objects within the model enabling operations teams to service align, manage costs, mitigate risk and deliver quality services driving the business and growth.

Monitor, Manage, Measure and Report on your Workloads Intelligently!

Check out this recent article: How to Monitor, Measure and Report on your Workloads