Give me CMDB before I die
If there's a fashionable topic in the enterprise at the moment, it's ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library, a collection of best practices for managing IT operations) and its contribution to IT Governance. For developers, it's all about designing holistic systems, with operational resilience, upgrade, maintenance and even change …
I refer in fact to the comment "For a start, you probably already have all the information needed for your CMDB"
I my experience organisations rarely have this information, granted they may have a purchase order for single items or batches of PCs, but knowing where they all are and what they are doing, forget it!
Well, there was a touch of irony in that statement. Yes, I think that people probably do have the data, but whether they can find it or use it, whether it is "information", is moot.
There is a big difference between buying a CMDB product and implementing a CMDB-based process - and data location and QA is a big part of it.
Of course, basic asset management is fundamental to any sort of IT governance. If you don't know what technology you have, where it is and what is running on it, how can you claim to be in control of anything? Yet, people in that business tell me that many asset management systems fell into disuse once Y2k "fizzled out"...
David
