Drogseth / Sturm / Twing CMDB Systems

Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-12-801373-1
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 402 Seiten

CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile shows you how an integrated database across all areas of an organization's information system can help make organizations more efficient reduce challenges during change management and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition, this valuable reference provides guidelines that will enable you to avoid the pitfalls that cause CMDB projects to fail and actually shorten the time required to achieve an implementation of a CMDB. Drawing upon extensive experience and using illustrative real world examples, Rick Sturm, Dennis Drogseth and Dan Twing discuss: - Unique insights from extensive industry exposure, research and consulting on the evolution of CMDB/CMS technology and ongoing dialog with the vendor community in terms of current and future CMDB/CMS design and plans - Proven and structured best practices for CMDB deployments - Clear and documented insights into the impacts of cloud computing and other advances on CMDB/CMS futures - Discover unique insights from industry experts who consult on the evolution of CMDB/CMS technology and will show you the steps needed to successfully plan, design and implement CMDB - Covers related use-cases from retail, manufacturing and financial verticals from real-world CMDB deployments - Provides structured best practices for CMDB deployments - Discusses how CMDB adoption can lower total cost of ownership, increase efficiency and optimize the IT enterprise

Dennis Drogseth is Vice President/Research IT Megatrends, Analytics and CMDB Systems at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), which provides market research and advisory services to software companies and IT executives. Dennis spent 14 years with IBM in marketing and communications, including a year of international consulting, and also worked to develop marketing strategies and new business models for Cabletron's SPECTRUM management software.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Drogseth, Dennis

Sturm, Rick

Twing, Dan

Leseproben

Introduction: How to Use This Book
“CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile” is a unique combination of recommendations, industry insights, perspectives, and guidelines. Although this book does provide a significant amount of guidance and structure, it also offers up many diverse examples of how various approaches to making configuration management databases (CMDBs) and federated configuration management systems work. The overall goal is to provide you with both a landscape and a guide to help you select the options that fit your level of readiness, your most critical requirements, and your longer-term priorities. To do this, we have drawn on past consulting experience that includes extensively documented consulting reports, ongoing vendor dialogs and evaluations of vendor offerings, and 11 deployment-related interviews conducted solely for the purpose of enriching this book. We have also leveraged 10 years of research—including quantitative data analysis and CMDB deployment-related interviews. These quantitative data summaries and commentaries from CMDB team leaders, stakeholders, and consultants complement our recommendations regarding process, organization, and technology. In many places throughout the narrative, the book is designed to be much like a journalistic documentary capturing many different first-person perspectives on issues, benefits, and recommendations for success. Such a rich and diverse set of sources sets this book apart from all other books on the market today. In Chapter 1, we define the CMDB as a “central data store of critical IT environmental information with links to such information stored in other systems to document the location, configuration, and interdependency of key IT assets, both physical assets and applications. The CMDB can support the change process by identifying interdependencies, improve regression testing by capturing insights surrounding these interdependencies, and help diagnose problems impacted by changes to the IT environment.” As we will make clear in subsequent pages, we use the term “CMDB System” to indicate that way of combining the notion of a core CMDB with yet broader requirements for federated sources, integrated automation, analytics, reporting, and visualization that make the larger project come alive with real benefits. However, since there are many different approaches to doing this—given unique IT environments, changing requirements, and improving technologies—we have chosen to use the plural “CMDB Systems” in the title. (A more complete definition is given in Chapter 1 and elaborated on in Chapter 3—CMDB Foundations.) How to Use This Book
As this book is both a guide and a landscape of options and insights, it is designed to encourage you to create your own individual road map optimized to your needs and your environment. You can supplement our structural recommendations with the many lessons learned from others “in the trenches”—who have struggled with and overcome the many diverse obstacles to CMDB success. Indeed, there are times when CMDB deployment narratives do seem to evoke stories from a war zone in which combatants are besieged as much by political and attitudinal issues as they are by technological frustrations. But once a “tipping point” for delivering benefits is reached (usually about 6 months out), the values can become enormous. This is true because rather than being simply technology deployments, CMDB Systems are active catalysts to promote the transformation of IT organizations from being “cost centers” to becoming “business partners” and “value providers.” In order to prepare you to create your own CMDB System road map, this book is designed around the following structure: 1. The introductory sections look at challenges and benefits overall. These sections are narrated in large part by voices reflecting actual deployment issues and successes. 2. The second section provides foundational preparation for going forward. This includes a chapter focusing on process guidelines and technological foundations (CMDB Foundations) and a chapter (CMDB Deployment Stages) outlining our proven methodology: the Eight-Step Ladder to CMDB Success. 3. The third section targets self-awareness and goals. This alignment is deliberate as the two are inseparable: You need to be self-aware to set appropriate CMDB-related goals, but having well-communicated initial objectives can spur further awareness of stakeholder priorities, technology gaps, resource requirements, and other issues. This section begins with a look at trends impacting IT more broadly, such as cloud, agile software development, mobile computing, and the “consumerization of IT.” It continues with recommendations for effective and ongoing executive dialog, CMDB use case audits, and IT maturity/readiness assessments. 4. The fourth section describes how to move forward by soliciting and documenting requirements and generating metrics to guide your deployment and measure your progress. This includes creating effective and realistic plans for expected benefits, including return on investment benefits, and establishing detailed requirements to meaningfully align your goals with CMDB System specifics. We include a section on the skill sets that make for an effective core CMDB team and how you should expect to work with stakeholders and customers. 5. This section will take you through how to run your project with details on technology selection for core CMDB and Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) investments. The next step is “closing the gap” between proof of concept and actual deployments by fine-tuning your requirements as the realities of team resources and technology investments are established. This will allow you to create a tiered road map for going forward looking at 6-month, 12-month, and 2-year stages. Included in this section is a discussion of service and data modeling and relevant standards for federating a CMDB System. 6. In “assessing your success,” we look at real-world perspectives at the tipping point of value for CMDB deployments—including lessons learned and priorities for going forward. We then address some of the most compelling opportunities for next-phase CMDB growth in terms of service-aware asset management, cloud, analytics, and agile software development. 7. The appendices include the following: a. A glossary of terms b. A sample RFP for core CMDB technology selection c. A guide on how to use this book for a readiness assessment (are you ready for a CMDB?) d. A partial list of relevant CMDB and ADDM vendors with a summary of their offerings e. A bibliography of consulting, research, and other sources Time Line
Throughout this book, we refer back to the Eight-Step Ladder to CMDB System Success as a series of stages and talk about a 6-month window on showing initial benefits. The 6-month window is our estimation of how long you’ll have before executive enthusiasm begins to wane—based on our experience from consulting and research. The expectation here is that at least steps 1-7 can be achieved within that window and some major project milestones are achieved. The hope is that initial production-level deployment of at least some components of the CMDB System can be accomplished within the first 6 months, as you approach what we call the “tipping point” in demonstrating value to your stakeholders (see Figure 1). Figure 1 The Eight-Step Ladder to CMDB System Success, introduced in Chapter 4, is used throughout this book to help punctuate a critical set of decision points directed at optimizing CMDB advantages across technology, process, and cultural/organizational considerations. However, it would contradict the spirit of this book to assume that each CMDB initiative will follow the same time line and hence that the time line guidelines indicated below are absolute or one-size-fits all. The actual vagaries of real deployments constantly show otherwise. And while our 6-month window is not a best-case scenario—we have seen even far more aggressively successful deployments—a 6-month time line does assume solid support throughout, a full-time committed CMDB team leader, and reasonably consistent stakeholder cooperation. First month: Even given these parameters, step one is hard to measure. In almost all cases, it will have actually begun months and maybe even years before, as the CMDB team-leader-to-be begins to consider the value of a CMDB System in context with his or her actual environment. The actual step one kickoff would begin with some initial executive dialog, time commitment, and a very high-level plan to go forward into an assessment (step two). Step one would also of necessity include several assessment-relevant interviews at the executive or management level and ideally include a few key stakeholders to support the initial formulation of the plan. Next 3 months: Once the assessment or audit is under way (step...