CMDB, the “Bill of Material” of the IT factory

The full version of this article was co-developed with CA communications

For years manufacturing has relied upon a central document called a Bill of Material, which describes, in minute detail, each component of the product. It serves as the foundation for design, procurement, manufacturing and distribution, and therefore as the foundation for companywide planning, costing and communication. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is developing into a similarly foundational repository for IT, describing the configuration items (CIs) comprising each IT service as well as their interrelationships. The CMDB helps IT organizations develop new services more easily, provide current services more efficiently and promptly correct any errors that may occur.


CMDB as the foundation
Service management is a discipline based on the ITIL philosophy. Using a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) service management can provide an integrated view of IT services and facilitate the required cost control. This is crucial as in today’s information based society IT cost becomes an ever more significant part of the total cost. And stringent rationalization and automation as part of industrialized service provisioning can reduce IT costs by at least 10% to 15% annually, contributing significantly to a company’s competitiveness.

Fixing problems faster
The CMDB makes it also easier to find, correct and even prevent errors, because staff can immediately see which IT services will be affected when an IT resource goes down. Moreover, the CMDB reveals which business processes are impacted by an interruption in a given IT service. This helps staff set the right priorities during troubleshooting.

Implementing changes safely
Even today the majority of service outages occur as the undesired and unexpected result of introduced changes. This often results in a common attitude of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. A CMDB enables evaluating the impact of changes before they are made and as a result enables a proactive continual improvement attitude.

Providing new IT services faster
Better IT service availability and performance are not the only economic benefits of a CMDB. Just as industrial designers, manufacturing engineers and sales personnel can develop new products based on existing Bill of Materials, management, departments, software engineers and IT teams can customize existing IT services to meet new demands or derive new IT services from existing ones based on CMDB information.

Providing existing IT services easier
The CMDB also simplifies the process of establishing and provisioning a front-end service catalog for users in order to show them which services are available, what they cost (depending on the requested service qualities such as response times) and how quickly they can be available. If the CMDB is the Bill of Material of the IT factory, then the service catalog is its online store.

The IT factory can now follow the laws of economics more closely. IT experts become the production planners and finance engineers of the IT factory. They become partners with management and other departments in the delivery and continuous optimization of business services.

Download the full version of this article.

IT services at the push of a button—simple to consume but hard to deliver?

The full version of this article was co-developed with CA communications

In modern companies, IT and business processes are practically inseparable. A business transaction such as a an online banking transaction or making a mobile phone call are business services provided almost entirely through IT services. But also insurance companies, hospitals and government organizations have completely automated certain business processes, with increasingly serious consequences for IT.

As a result companies have a continuing obligation to ensure that IT expenditures and risk, don’t make their business services prohibitively expensive or unreliable. Service management, which has been promoted in the IT industry since the 1980s—primarily through the standards of ITIL, offers a possible way out. Unfortunately, the various tools developed by the IT industry to implement ITIL standards for service management are insufficient. Today’s companies have no use for tools that support individual ITIL disciplines such as service support or service level management. Instead they need an integrated approach to service management that manages business services, keeps track of the cost of these services and provides complete, uniform support.
This includes automating and warranting supply from the “IT factory” as well as advanced support functions such as support automation for a seamless user experience, knowledge management for easy access to know answers and corrective actions and a service desk for uniform collecting and reporting of information. Other key components are portfolio view of the offered services, a catalog to give users easy access to the available services, integrated IT asset management, IT governance, and complete change and release management.

Integration is key
Ideally the heart of such a suite is a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which serves as a central repository for all IT assets, users, roles, rights and authorizations. For the most part, the CMDB is the main source of information for populating the service catalog to describe the available services in detail, explain what constitute these services from the functional perspective. It can also indicate who can access them and how much they cost.

Automation is growing in importanceThe automation of service operation and support requires that the service management suite can manage and control the corresponding functions in the IT factory, and that it do so by closely working with modern data center automation tools and with traditional system and network management systems.

Today’s requirements ask for a suite concept similar to the idea of Office and ERP suites, simplifying the expansion of functionalities as well as the implementation of the best practices and allows for continually improving processes. All this becomes possible when solutions suites allow for uniform usage, simplified licensing and take a departure from the typical heterogenous patchwork solutions of the past.

Download the full version of this article.

Selling Services by the Pound, a re-birth of economic thinking in IT

Any Genesis fans will immediatly realise the title of this blog dates me. In fact I finished my formal education more than three decades ago. And although I realised at the time that the study I did was quit innovatif, as it tried to combine economics and informatics theory into something we nowadays would call "Economics of IT", I truly did not expect that it would take twentysomewhat years for it to become as relevant as it is today.

Time to start collecting some thoughts?

"Laws of IT" explores Service Portfolio Management

Laws of IT is a new initiative that discusses serious IT matters in a entertaining way, using a variety of media such as web, video, blogs and discussion groups.

In the first episode you meet Mr. Demand and Mr. Supply, exploring Service Portfolio Management and you will see Peter Hinssen, in a special appearance as CIO therapist extraordinaire.

The media:
Laws of IT on Youtube

Lessons from a decade of Clinger-Cohen

This article was first published in AutomatiseringGids on February 22, 2008 and is available in both the original Dutch and in English.

All across Europe government spending on information technology is being scrutinized. For example the Dutch Government Accounting Office ’s suggested the introduction of a law comparable to the American Clinger-Cohen Act. The Clinger-Cohen Act has been in force in the United States for about 11 years. So now is a good time to take the US experiences and review them against our European (political and administrative) context and culture.

Achievements under Clinger-Cohen
According t the annual Chief Information Officer (CIO) survey by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) among current and former US Federal Government CIO’s, Clinger-Cohen has:
· Shifted the focus of government IT from acquisition to management
· Led to a common management framework for all government IT
· Improved investment planning
· Provided the necessary foundation for better project management
· Improved the alignment of IT with the agency’s mission
· Given CIO’s a seat at the boardroom table

Alignment
The central theme of Clinger-Cohen is the business-based implementation of IT. It’s remarkable that, in contrast with earlier regulations or with a regulation like Sarbanes-Oxley, that not a certain level of compliance was made mandatory. Instead realizing an annual, demonstrable improvement was the ‘only’ obligation. In other words, the journey was seen as more important than the destination.

At first, many IT organizations (sometimes jokingly referred to as Cylinders of Excellence) took a ‘wait and see’ approach to Clinger-Cohen, and the first years showed little progress. Real improvement started when additional regulation set out both the what and how of such a “business-based approach to IT”. With as main characteristics a portfolio management approach (see sidebar) and mandatory public reporting using standards such as Earned Value Management (EVM) to objectively measure project progress.
Government Projects

A recent report by the Netherlands Government Accounting Office observes that government IT projects often become too ambitious and complex due to a combination of political, organizational and technological factors. In the initial phases of government IT projects the different players (minister, House of Representatives and suppliers) typically accelerate rather than slow down the spiral towards too large, too complex projects. Resulting in a higher risk of failure and a generally bad track record of government IT projects.
The portfolio approach set out by Clinger-Cohen forces government agencies to explicitly state risks, costs and possible yields in relation to core government tasks. The basis for such a dialogue preferably is a continuous improvement plan for government IT spending. In past years, many of the points set out by Clinger-Cohen have been tried or even implemented in some form in Europe, but not under the umbrella of one single program supported and enforced by countries highest authorities.

SIDEBAR: Clinger-Cohen Act
The Clinger-Cohen Act was passed by US Congress in 1996 and gave the American Office of Management and Budget (OMB) final responsibility for improving the acquisition and use of IT within the federal government. The law centers on a more business-driven approach to IT. Therefore the OMB mandates that all federal government IT budget holders use a portfolio approach (see sidebar) as the standard process for analyzing, tracking and evaluating the risks and results of all IT investments.

SIDEBAR: A Portfolio Management approach
IT Portfolio Management offers an approach for IT investment decisions that’s similar to the approach commonly used for investment decisions in financial markets. IT Portfolio Management started out as Project Portfolio Management (PPM), focused on control of (IT) development projects. When the number of parallel projects increases and multiple branches, departments and divisions or even countries have to work together, one central source of truth regarding the availability of resources and about project progress becomes essential. Today, IT Portfolio Management is increasingly deployed to substantiate and monitor all IT investments, including recurring costs for maintenance, support, and service. A report European government report gives a striking description of the impact: “IT administrators suddenly turn into asset investment managers.

Full Dutch and English text.