IT Management 2.0

Finally, I’ve had a chance to catch my breath - and grab a few minutes to

A Closer Look at itSMF '09

write this post - after a rather fast-paced week focused on service management at the itSMF USA Fusion 2009 conference in Dallas, Texas.

The total number of attendees (a little more than 1,200) was down from last year, but not by too much.  But that didn’t temper the enthusiasm or focus of attendees.

I made my way around the event in a kind of haphazard way.  In large part, it reflected my function at this event:  Support itSMF USA in general (EMC is a platinum sponsor), help the EMC team at our expo booth, and gain additional insights from presentations and networking.  Despite a lack of formal structure, I returned home with a lot of new insights related to service management.

• Most Surprising Phrase I DIDN’T Hear:  “I’m just getting started with ITIL…”  At previous events, I always come across at least half a dozen people who were just getting going on their service management journey.  This year, I didn’t hear those words at all.  In my opinion, that in general implies a strong, long-term commitment to IT service management.
• Most Discussed Topics:  I didn’t hear as much interest in more basic processes and functions (such as problem and incident management).  The people seemed most interested in the service catalog, service level management, and the CMDB/CMS.  So lot of interest in these more-advanced service management topics also points to an overall higher level of service management maturity, which is also a good thing.
• Most-Welcomed Agenda Focus:  Hands down, this one has to be IT and process compliance.  Previous conferences didn’t cover it much.  Although ITIL provides implicit guidance, my sense is it’s not enough for most people - and that integrating and ITIL implementation with a complementing compliance-oriented framework (such as CoBIT) is still a little too far down the maturity path for most. 
• Presentations I Most Enjoyed:  The opening and closing keynotes (by Jacki Freiberg and Glenn O’Donnell) were the two best sessions I attended.  The best track presentation I saw was by Cathy Kirch of Allstate on using maturity assessments as an improvement tool for your ITIL program.  And kudos to Kirk Weisler for reprising his role as event emcee, as well as a great presentation on corporate culture and the power of being positively contagious.
• Cloud Computing as a Topic Drew a Lot of Interest:  More interest than I would’ve expected.  However, given the service management audience, it makes a lot of sense too.  Why?  Because service management and continual service improvement is as much a long-term journey as is the transition from physical to virtual to cloud computing.  These folks get that you have to crawl before you can walk before you can run.  As IT organizations start to make these transitions, the role of service management becomes that much more important.  So the interest I observed implies a lot of proactive thinking about his whole journey to the private cloud.
• Biggest Flaw of Fusion:  From my perspective as a service management generalist, I hate when I have to choose among many different, interesting presentations that occur concurrently.  I don’t know if there’s any easy way to fix that, but it is a continuing problem with this conference.  That is, folks miss out hearing some really good stories and best practices simply because the session schedules overlap too much.

Overall, I think my friend Glenn O’Donnell said it best during his closing keynote:

“This feels a lot like a family reunion — except I like everyone here”

The commitment demonstrated by attendees, volunteers, and sponsors at Fusion ‘09 bodes well for this community in general - and IT and business organizations overall - as the ongoing quest for service improvement and IT service management excellence continues.

I’d like to hear your thoughts - or rants, raves, or stories - about Fusion ‘09.

Brian Lett

Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Service Management Cloud, CMDB, EMC, ITIL, itSMF

From research and my recent conversations with co-workers and analysts,

A Pedestal in the Clouds: Accelerating Your Virtualization Journey

it seems clear that there is an increasing awareness that the existing notion of a configuration management database (CMDB) — where it is the central repository for all information about the data center and the decisions are made for its management — is an unrealistic and problematic model. 

In today’s data center, the rate of change alone is too daunting a task for any one database management solution to effectively handle.

However, the CMDB remains a key piece of the puzzle because it offers a single place where we can go to make critical decisions about how to optimize operations, address configuration issues, and triage problems and service outages. 

We need the CMDB — especially as our data centers continue down the road of virtualization and make their way to the private cloud.  But we need to make sure that it has not only up-to-date and accurate information, but has the “right” information and that it provides federated access to real-time information about the resources that underpin the critical business services.  Without integration from the discovery to the CMDB - and without integration between the discovery sources - this simply is not possible.

So, rather than continuously building new connectors to link discovery to our CMDB and hope that it can reconcile all the configuration items (CIs), EMC offers a new approach…Perhaps it’s not new…It’s actually well aligned with the ITIL v3 concept of a configuration management system (CMS)where the CMDB is part (a critical part) of a more modular and federated approach to configuration visibility across the data center. 

EMC Ionix Data Center Insight offers a single integration point for best-of-breed discovery across applications, servers, network devices, and storage — inclusive of virtual environments.  On top of this, it deduplicates CI data so a customer can reconcile CIs.  It provides - through a Web services interface - virtualization of cross-domain dependency maps and the applied “best practices” based CIs to EMC’s (and third-party) CMDBs.

The result is a practical approach to populating and managing a CMDB with the “right” information, such that customers can easily understand the resources that underpin the business services.  And they can visualize the infrastructure dependencies so they can more effectively plan changes and avoid inadvertently disrupting business services.  With this, customers have all the foundational components needed to build an effective configuration management system — while making the most of their existing environments. 

In my opinion, this is a real game-changer and I look forward to the continued buzz (and philosophical debate) that the announcement has already generated.

Thoughts???

Jeff Abbott

Change and Configuration, Cloud, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Population, Dependency Mapping Cloud, CMDB, Configuration Management Systems, Ionix

Management, vClouds and IaaS - Musings from VMworld

From where I sit in sessions at VMworld, at our EMC Ionix booth, and from

VMWorld: Sunny with a Chance of -- CLOUD!

talking to customers/industry analysts/fellow vendors - not to mention the lady who sold me a bottle of water for $3.50!!! - it looks like IT management is creating another barrier to adoption, this time around the cloud. There seems to be a general bemoaning of the fact - with surveys to back it up - about the lack of tools that are really helping customers migrate with confidence to the cloud. Keep Reading…

Cloud Cloud, EMC, IT Management, VMware, VMworld