Iterating on IT Service

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or Continual Service Improvement – You decide

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:11:00 -0500

Most of the country thinks CSI stands for "Crime Scene Investigation," as popularized on TV. In a convoluted sort of way, the acronym means something similar in ITIL® v3. This is a stretch, but bear with me. In v3, CSI stands for Continual Service Improvement and it is the fifth volume of the v3 publication. In the v3 scheme of things, CSI is the...

Should Service Users Be Tracked as CIs in the CMDB?

Marvin Waschke — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:17:00 -0500

As CMDB experts go, I have a lot of experience, starting with implementations a decade ago when ITIL was almost unknown in North America. Still, a question posed to me at CA's recent customer-focused Development Buddy Summit sent me to the books -- the ITIL® books that is -- hunting for an answer. In a one-on-one conference, a customer asked me if it was appropriate to use...

The CMDB and the Hungarian Bankers

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:46:00 -0600

Last week I spoke with a Hungarian banker about the CMDBf specification. He was broad and burley, with a thick beard, a muscular neck, shoulders like a bear, and a gruff, heavily accented voice. "CMDBf?" he sneered with a toss of his head. "I'll believe it when I see it." I was dumfounded, though not with his skepticism. After all, although I see...

CMDBf Specification: Implementing now makes sense

Marvin Waschke — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:39:00 -0600

In December, I blogged happily that "DMTF Accepts New CMDBf Specification." Since then, the CMDB Federation Work Group of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has met four times and the CMDBf consortium, which wrote the spec before turning it over to the DMTF, is winding down. We are still working out the preliminaries for the work group--electing co-chairs, getting our...

CML: Another milestone in the push for interoperability

Marvin Waschke — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:44:00 -0600

Followers of my blog know that I am sucker for a good standard. I am a shameless idealist. My personal mission is to make IT organizations hum (picture the current VISA commercials) and to ensure that when the inevitable hiccups do occur, the cause is not incompatible solutions from different vendors. While you've seen me blog often about the CMDBf, I've also been working on CML...

Sample Implementations Ease Adoption: A Parallel between CMDBf and SNMP

Marvin Waschke — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:52:00 -0600

To quote Yogi Berra, "it's déjà vu all over again." I could not shake that feeling after reading an article entitled "Providing a CMDBf Query and Registration Service" that appeared in the Eclipse Wiki on the COSMOS project page. Eclipse is an open source community and COSMOS (Community-driven Systems Management in Open Source) is an Eclipse incubator group for...

Happy Holidays from down on the farm

Marvin Waschke — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:35:00 -0600

I thought you might enjoy a glimpse of our farm in the snow. Forty years ago, my father raised calves in this small barn that my grandfather built around 1900. It was the first barn built on the farm. He later erected a much larger hay barn, but I don't have a picture I like as well as this one my wife took last winter. Happy Holidays, Marv ...

CMDB Dilemma: Authorized versus Observed Configuration

Marvin Waschke — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:25:00 -0600

I've been watching a battle between two opposing schools of thought in the CMDB world. One says that a CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the IT Service environment. Not the real configuration, not the way the system is working now, but the authorized configuration as determined by the change board and the planning groups. The other school wants a CMDB to be as accurate a...

DMTF Accepts New CMDBf Specification

Marvin Waschke — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:50:00 -0600

If you've been following the progress of the CMDBf spec through my blog postings, you understand how proud and happy I am at the news that the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), the "the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives" announced that it "accepted a draft specification...

The Unified Service Model and the CMDB

Marvin Waschke — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:16:00 -0600

In an article in CIO entitled "Why IT Needs a Blueprint: The Case for a Unified Service Model," my colleague, Helge Scheil, wrote the following: "A Unified Service Model provides insight into the service definition--that is, the assets, people and processes that support each service--and key information about each service such as costs, service levels, problems,...

You Got Some Service Catalog in my Service Desk

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:25:00 -0600

Like peanut butter and chocolate, service catalog and service desk are quite good alone, but even better together. Always closely related, the products have gone through a curious evolution since I first worked on developing service products--years before those products were entrusted to CA's care. My first exposure to the two applications came when I was working for Boeing as a...

The remarkable tale of the birth of a standard

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 12:20:00 -0600

I've been involved with the development of two standards recently: the CMDBf standard and Service Modeling Language (SML). Each has followed a similar path, starting as a brainchild of an industry consortium and then moving on to a public standards body. While establishing a standard is an exciting goal in that it moves the IT industry forward, the process to achieve that goal can be tedious....

ITIL v3: Simplifying Complexity

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:44:00 -0500

I have been following the reaction to ITIL® v3 with great interest. My own views diverge from most of the public comments I have heard, which is not surprising since I tend to look at IT from a developer's perspective, which differs from that of many ITIL pundits. The talk is that v3 is on the upward slope of a hype cycle; it is poorly understood but still expected to solve all...

ITIL v3 Transforms IT from "Overhead" to "Transaction Cost"

Marvin Waschke — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:35:00 -0500

Like many of you, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and pondering about ITIL® v3 lately. What is different about v3? Is it an improvement over v2? Is it likely to change the way IT is conducted? I’ve been particularly intrigued with a statement in the introduction to the ITIL v3 Service Strategy book that says “transaction costs” determine the boundaries of an organization. I wonder how...

CMDBf in the Limelight

Marvin Waschke — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:03:00 -0500

For those of us involved with the CMDBf from the start, the recent media attention on the publication of the Version 0.95 specification has been exciting. It’s as though we’ve finally given birth and we now get to proudly share pictures of the baby. A joint press release entitled “Technology Leaders Release Specification for Federating and Accessing Multi-Vendor IT Management Data” was...