erp4it

ITIL: Process or function??

Some thoughts that have been bubbling for a while, as I dig deeper into the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) -

Many of the ITIL practice areas (in particular those in Service Delivery) do not appear to be processes in the strict business process management sense. Change, Release, Incident and Problem management all are true business processes: they are repeatable, measurable, start with a defined event, and have a clear value-add end state.

This may be heretical, but I am starting to view Configuration, Availability, Capacity, Financial, and now Operations Management as functions...

OGC licensing ITIL & Prince2 rights

Very interesting. Note that this does not include the core material, but does include exam accreditation and derivative materials, including enforcement of ITIL trademark infringement. 

In full heads down book mode which is why things are quiet on this front. 180 pages done (typeset equivalent), targeting 220 for 1st draft and then to the reviewers and case study contributors by Jan 15th or so... some quiet time at an isolated lodge up in the Great North Woods this New Years will help. (Well, given the company, it may not be entirely quiet... :-)

-Charlie

ITRP = ERP4IT?

Hearing the term "IT Resource Planning" (ITRP) w/increasing frequency. Appears to be synonymous with "ERP for IT" and probably is a better brand. (No, won't change the blog name.)

Troux registered the domain name itrp.com. Wonder if they'll try to lay claim to the acronym as a proprietary brand.

Some speculator registered erpit.com. The land grab is on...

-Charlie

OGC and ITGI collaborate on official ITIL/COBIT mapping

The producers of the CobiT (ITGI) and ITIL (OGC/ITSMF) standards have published an official mapping between CobiT and ITIL, which also references ISO 17799. (Since ISO didn't co-author this, I don't consider the ISO mapping official.)

This is a useful piece of work, but I must admit to some mixed feelings. There are various areas where the CobiT standard is not covered by ITIL at all, including ... DATA MANAGEMENT AND DAMA PEOPLE TAKE NOTE ... all of the CobiT guidance around data management. To re-iterate this key point: CobiT recognizes the importance of data management; ITIL currently does not (although it did in the past).

When a CobiT control objective is completely not addressed by ITIL, they left the line blank, which is fine. I have more concern about areas where the ITIL material is cited as coverage, especially when volumes other than Service Delivery and Service Support are brought in. The Service Delivery and Service Support volumes are the best known parts of ITIL by far, they are the basis for all the available training and certification, and they are what people mean when they say they are "doing ITIL." These key volumes have helped standardize language and establish a working consensus as to the kernel of operational IT management. However, ITIL has always been more ambitious than that, with its volumes on Application, Security, ICT, and Business Perspective.

IT governance & related weblog

I like the EyeToIT weblog very much (especially since it's run by another Minnesotan!) This recent post on IT education and computer science was summarized in a widely read ACM list, and speaks to some of the issues we've discussed here.

-ctb

A configuration management maturity model

Just some quick thoughts on how configuration management might evolve. This is not a strict model; certain things can be leapfrogged (while others can't). Comments appreciated.

Level	Hardware	Software
Level 1	Hardware inventory, manually maintained through periodic inventory.	Software licenses manually maintained through periodic inventory.
Level 2	Hardware inventory maintained through procurement and change management process, supported by basic automated scanning. Hardware to installed commercial software dependency maintained through manual and/or automatic means.	Software licenses maintained through procurement and change management processes.
Level 3	Hardware characteristics and dependencies (e.g. network topology) discovered by automated scanning. Configuration scanning to enforce change control.	Enterprise application portfolio, including ownership/responsibility baselined and maintained through change management proceses. Automated release management provides software to hardware dependencies.
Level 4	Hardware to software product dependencies compiled and maintained through fingerprint-based scanning. Hardware to application portfolio dependencies compiled and maintained through manual and/or automated processes.	Database catalogs maintained as first class configuration items. Application to application and application to database dependencies captured and maintained: Sychronous and asynchronous app dependencies distinguished. Application to software product dependencies compiled and maintained. Change risk assessment is (at least partly) based on automated analysis of system dependencies. Security processes enforce CMDB accuracy: “if it’s not in the CMDB, you can’t have access to it.”
Level 5	Change control scanning integrated with asset and topology-oriented config.	Middleware dependencies fully mapped out at component level. Component level management possible for other areas if ROI is there. Software architecture gatewayed through release management are primary input into CMDB for application/business service dependencies (e.g. UML component/deployment diagrams). Enterprise architecture capability uses configuration management data for what-if modeling. Service management processes enforce CMDB accuracy: “if it’s not in the CMDB, we don’t support SLAs, availability, or capacity modeling.”

-ctb

The origin of the CMM stages

Thing found out en route to looking up other things (and can anyone tell me who I stole that tagline from?)

The first publication of a staged maturity model applied to IT was not by CMM/SEI, but rather Richard Nolan in "Managing the computer resource: a stage hypothesis," Communications of the ACM, Volume 16 ,  Issue 7  (July 1973), Pages: 399 - 405.

Fascinating - in that article, he references Karl Marx, Das Kapital, as well as John Maynard Keynes.

Just thought you might like to know.

-ctb

Guide to IT Service Management

Updated: This book is available through Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201737922/itsmportal-21/026-8271473-1747613

The Guide to IT Service Management is an exhaustive compendium of much industry-leading thought on all aspects of large-scale IT management. This 800-page tome (somewhat hard to obtain in the U.S.) features over 50 in-depth articles and case studies on issues such as service lifecycle management, conceptual IT frameworks, organizational and process issues, and much more. It is one of the most comprehensive and concentrated collections of high quality IT management writings available, in a field somewhat diffuse and hard to research.

Good luck finding a copy...

-ctb

Van Bon, J., The guide to IT service management 2002. 2002, London ; Boston: Addison Wesley, ISBN 0201737922.

SIM, AITP, and other IT professional groups

I thought that the Society for Information Management was getting more ink than usual lately (example); their "SIM in the News" page confirms this with a dramatic spike this month. Are they on a publicity push? We do need a general-purpose IT organization and I'm not sure ITSMF is it...

Note that 1) Microsoft is a prominent member of SIM and 2) Microsoft's Bill Gates is on a big IT education push; could the two be related?

Thing with the national SIM is their membership criteria is elitist. (Just being objective - nothing wrong with elitism, but it by definition limits your base of support.)

The AITP is another organization to look at - also with Microsoft as a major sponsor. Looks like membership is more broadly based, but they don't appear to be as active as SIM lately. Both SIM and AITP have affiliates here in the U.S. Upper Midwest (NWAITP and SIMMN, along with DAMA-MN and MN-IPS. The Minnesota ITSMF chapter can be reached through the national ITSMF web page).

-ctb

ITIL @ U of MN; excellent config paper

The University of Minnesota (my alma mater) has developed quite a strong ITIL offering through its College of Continuing Education. This resources page includes podcasts and white papers, including a good one on configuration management by a senior Carlson Company IT manager. (Carlson is headquartered in Minnesota.) Recommended; very well structured and written. There is also an excellent discussion on ITIL metrics with a Carlson School (U of MN business school) professor.

Dr. Arnon Rosenthal

Those of you particularly concerned with data architecture may want to check out Dr. Arnon Rosenthal's work; I just re-visited his site tonight and was reminded of the uniformly high quality of this man's research and thought.

I found his recent work on Data Service Agreements: Toward a Data Supply Chain particularly good; he proposes the concept of Data Service Agreement:

"DSAs are a specialization of service level agreements (SLA) between service providers and consumers [Wust02]. Typically, SLAs emphasize performance metrics about time (e.g., response or problem resolution time) or availability (e.g., maximum percentage of downtime). However, we are aware of no prior work on SLAs to address data obligations (e.g., the need to provide data of a certain quality at specified time intervals)."

As a service management approach, a DSA as he describes it might be more of an internal service (OLA) or underpinning contract, but (as he notes) there is really no other work in this area, so hats off to Dr. Rosenthal for starting a conversation here.

-Charlie

Landed a book deal w/Elsevier

Longtime readers of this blog know that I started it with the goal of writing a book. Well, after two years, the strategy seems to have worked. I just inked a contract with science publisher Elsevier (via their Morgan Kaufmann subsidiary) to do just that. (Champagne toast with the extended family this night...!)

I'm already having second thoughts about the title (ERP for IT: Architecting IT Governance), but my editor tells me that the title is often the last thing settled before publication. I'm also kicking around:

The IT Value Chain Enabled
Architecture and Patterns for integrating IT Governance, Solutions Delivery, and Service Management.

Thoughts?

I'll be looking for reviewers - the more the merrier - and case studies (sanitized are fine) to intersperse and liven up the narrative. If you have some suggestions, please drop me a line at charb@visi.com.

Thanks!

-Charlie

The circular reasoning of Nicholas Carr

OK - this is a little belated - but I was reading some CIO magazine back issues, and came across this interview with Nicholas "IT Doesn't Matter" Carr. The light finally went on: the guy has a circular premise.

- If it's in IT, it doesn't matter.
- If it matters, it's not the concern of IT.

Wonderful way to frame a thesis - you can never be proved wrong.

Language is power, and that is where he's playing - in the authoritative allocation of meaning to the term "IT." Beware.

-ctb

Convergence of Agile and Lean Six Sigma

So, I was studying up a little on Lean Six Sigma and started to think, "This sounds like an Agile take on Six Sigma."

Sure enough, Poppendieck is already well down that road...

-Charlie

The highest priority: aligning configuration management and portfolio management

What is the highest priority in enterprise IT?

• Increasing success in project management?
• Improving service levels?
• Aligning IT with business objectives?

It’s dangerous to generalize, and any one of those priorities might be the primary goal in a given IT environment. But there is one more:

• Prevent operational costs from overtaking the entire IT budget

This could be re-stated as “drive down operational costs,” but it’s important to understand the consequence of failure: the loss of all innovative capability.

What are the drivers of higher operational and maintenance costs?

• No project plan for steady state: was TCO analyzed and defined? Were the resulting FTEs for operations and maintenance agreed to as incremental to the current base spend?
• Poor systems quality – even when the project is deemed a “success.” What is the incident rate? Unplanned maintenance releases?
• Complexity – even when the system “works.” Does it take 8 hours FTE on average every week (or night!) to get the overnight batch to completion? Did the last team working on a maintenance release spend half their time re-analyzing the system’s current state?
• Obsolescence – are knowledgeable staff more and more expensive? Is the hardware beyond a TCO “sweet spot”?
• Vendor/product issues – did your RDBMS vendor force you into a new version, imposing new maintenance releases across 25% of the applications in your portfolio? Did you understand the impact of this sufficiently in advance?

How do we start mitigating these cost drivers? “What gets measured, gets managed.” And we cannot measure until we name, normalize, classify, and/or enumerate. Without an accurate inventory count, the retailer does not know their net worth - and there is simply no substitute for walking the aisles and counting.

The analogous requirement for enterprise IT is the alignment of configuration management and portfolio management.

Configuration management has several levels of granularity, and several overlapping objectives. However, one characteristic of mature configuration management is leveraging the application concept as an organizing structure. Applications are assigned application IDs, which serve as the default naming standard for a large percentage of all configuration items in a given IT operation. This is often done by an operational team without reference to higher level considerations of enterprise architecture or portfolio management. However, much of the information required for application portfolio management derives directly from configuration management:

• How complex is this application?
• How many interfaces does it have?
• How many servers is it dependent on?
• What depends on it?
• How many batch jobs does it have? How long do they run every night?
• What databases is it dependent on? Do they have high-criticality data in them?
• How many incidents on average does it have a month? What are their first-call resolutions? What is the overall trend?
• What is the capacity trending in terms of CPU, memory, and disk for a system? For a family of system? For the entire application portfolio?
• What vendor products were used to build a given system? What systems are dependent on vendor product X?

And so forth. These numbers are primarily summary aggregations of information that at a granular level should be in the configuration management database (CMDB) and related systems. They are needed in portfolio and architecture discussions, as essential information for higher order questions such as:

• What is the overall technical profile of System A? Is it well-managed, technically sound, and at a reasonable TCO? (Of course, portfolio management would also want a business profile, but that isn't something configuration management can help with.)
• If we propose a replacement for System B, what are the downstream impacts and a first-order approximation of their costs?
• If vendor product X is going off support, do we understand the impact of that? If we wish to switch our Java application server vendor, how feasible is this?
• Is there an opportunity to move System C to a virtualized or grid architecture? Where in our portfolio of 100 applications is the best opportunity to do this?
• What servers are due for lease refresh and what are the impacted applications?
• What application teams are directly responsible for handling customer data, and do they have sufficient training?

And so forth.

However, today we have a gap with shortcomings on both sides. Configuration management (and by extension IT Service Management and ITIL) tooling today seems focused on reducing operational impacts (although there are signs of attention at least to capacity), and does little in terms of portfolio management.

On the other side, many portfolio management products seem to assume that a) portfolio management is all about managing projects; b) if it is about applications, the data needs to be manually re-harvested and re-analyzed – there is little or no assumption of integration with the operational ITSM space.

From a process perspective, an ideal state would be:

There are clearly opportunities for innovation here for creative vendors and consultants able to think outside their boxes.

Charlie

More on defining IT Governance

For those of you relying on RSS feeds, some of the more interesting discussions are taking place in the Yahoo group...

Jeff Tash has responded to my post here, and his response has opened my eyes to a lack of precision in my initial post. In hindsight, I should not have implied that I consider "IT Governance" to encompass all of portfolio management, SDLC, and service management. That leaves precious little out; the concept becomes undifferentiated from simply "Enterprise IT."

However, the anonymous individual who got me posting on this was reacting in particular to my data architecture, which represents key information (on portfolio, service, and SDLC) enabling IT governance. S/he thought that even such a data architecture was out of scope for a discussion of "IT Governance," because it wasn't strictly about the decision rights. This is, more precisely, where the disagreement lies I think. I do think that any discussion of IT Governance should also be open to the question of "how do we enable it"?

Anyways, as another person on the email list pointed out, such semantic hair splitting ultimately becomes as interesting as the "pop vs. soda" debate so I'll not beat this one to death.

-ctb

Defining "IT Governance"

Got some feedback recently that the way I'm using "IT Governance" is "nonstandard." The point of view is that the term should be reserved specifically for the allocation of decision rights in IT (i.e., how the CEO, lines of business, and centralized IT should interact). This definition is clearly seen in Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross's recent book IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results.

Extending the IT Governance term to include such matters as IT service management, portfolio management, and the software development lifecycle was seen by this person as, oh, I don't know, imprecise and there was an implication of "how dare you not use the term exactly as Weill and Ross do." (Wasn't very positive feedback.)

Well, since my B.A. was in Political Science I guess I have at least a little credibility in such matters. Let's draw an analogy to the US Government. In the challenging point of view, the study of "U.S. Governance" would be restricted to only cover the power relationships between the exectuve, legislative, and judicial branches, and between the federal, state, and municipal levels. Discussion of how governmental entities establish and control programs to regulate behavior, provide services and collect information would be out of scope, as would discussion of how such activities interact with the political decision rights.

I think most if not all political scientists would regard this scope as impoverished. My view is that "IT Governance," like the study of human governance generally, may start with decision rights (authoritative allocation of resources, in strict poli sci terms). But to understand how those decision rights have meaning and operate effectively within a given context, one must start to cover (at least at a high level) governmental program management, regulatory structures, service provision, and information gathering - the "how" as well as the "what."

A simple example: the US Constitution calls for representation based on population. This is supported by the US Census, which makes understanding the US Census (and  maneuvering around redistricting) at some level important for understanding how political representation is actually working in the US. Similarly, in order to understand the effectiveness of IT Governance, one must understand how the IT organization (considered broadly) is structuring its major initiatives, control structures, and client relationships, and how effectively it is collecting and analyzing the information it needs to do its job (this last being a key topic in this forum).

So, "IT Governance" as used by erp4it (and corresponding writings) will continue to be a bit broader than the canonical Weill/Ross definition.

Thoughts?

-Charlie

Dr. ITIL site

For those who haven't seen yet - I am liking the Dr. ITIL site very much - recommended.

Charlie

A Data Architecture for IT Service Management

All,

I'm happy to finally post this document I have been working on for the past 2 months:

A Data Architecture for IT Service Management

It's a lengthy (40 pages) analysis of ITSM and related IT governance concepts from a data architecture perspective. Included is a high level entity-relationship model, definitions, discussions of general data issues as pertinent to internal IT enablement, and some initial thoughts on data/process matrixing. Extensive coverage of the Configuration Item concept.

I hope that this is useful to ITSM practitioners!

Regards,

Charlie

PS. Thanks to Ben Berger of Unicorn for solving my PDF problems (and many others as well). If you want to make comments on the document send me an email and I'll send the Word document.

I mentioned this  a few weeks ago - now I'm sure. If you only buy and read one book on IT management this year, it should be

IT Portfolio Management

by Robert Handler and Bryan Maizlish. I'm only a ways into it, but it's already demonstrated tremendous insight. The introductory summation of just how bad things generally are in enterprise IT is worth the price alone.

If you are in IT management or concerned with the architecture of IT enablement systems - buy it. Now!

-ctb

An unusually good ITIL article

In Government Technology, Chad Vander Veen has written an unusually good ITIL article, covering history and context with a little more sophistication than most trade rag material.

-ctb

HP CMDB report by EMA

This brief & accessible research report by Enterprise Management Associates for HP on CMDBs is a must-read. The concept of "state" they describe is something I've been mulling over for a while - how do we distinguish between complex dependency capture emerging from different processes, and with different implications/imperatives? We will need this.

Check it out. Recommended.

-Charlie

A chilling bulletin from the security front lines

A little out of scope for this blog - but every IT professional should be keeping up on Windows Rootkits. Hardware defenses (memory scanners, probably with their own physical jacks, which in large data centers might ultimately result in an out of band security monitoring network) are required - start asking your server vendors NOW. We'll need a standard for such things.

-ctb

IT Portfolio Management book

Just ordered this new book on IT Portfolio Management -  it looks very promising. One of the guys is a Meta (now Gartner) analyst. Reportedly has good clarity on the distinction between application and project portfolio management - the former IMHO being far more relevant and important to the hard questions of IT governance, despite all the ink spilled on the latter.

-ctb

P.S. Where have I been? Well, I'm up to 30 dense pages on what's become my "Data Centric Approach to ITSM" paper; look for a first public draft soon.

Motive - CMDB vendor

Hadn't come across Motive before. They are selling a CMDB and discovery tools.

-Charlie

IT Compliance Institute

You can get a free membership to the IT Compliance Institute for a limited time. Fair amount of material. It's a 101 Publications (Application Development Trends, The Data Warehousing Institute) effort.

-Charlie

The academic community and IT governance: a rant

Just picked up a copy of the extremely promising book IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. It's by two MIT professors (Weill and Ross), who assert: "There has been little field-based research on IT governance, and few publications help managers understand the issues involved in designing effective governance structure and processes."

I've been thinking this for a while, and it's good to have validation from these two - it's a pretty damning assertion, actually. I have been a subscriber to both the ACM and IEEE digital libraries, and have monitored table of contents/abstract notifications from Elsevier for publications like Information Management, Information Sciences, Data & Knowledge Engineering, Information Processing & Management, Information Systems, and the International Journal of Information Management. I have also periodically checked on the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the Springer-Verlag publications. (Am I missing any other credible academic journals/publishers?)

With a few exceptions I have found the results generally irrelevant to the issues I've been exploring in this weblog, and which face me as a professional practitioner. Now, I don't expect a first-rank computer science journal like the ACM's Transactions on Computer Systems to cover applied management of IT, just as I would not expect a physics journal to go into details on electrical engineering. But I can't for the life of me figure out the applied MIS (as in business-school, MBA concentration) research priorities. One concern I have is whether the academic MIS folks are spending too much time mulling over problems that are properly the domain of their colleagues in Computer Science departments. We need the applied perspective, just as materials science is an application of physics and chemistry, and merits its own journals. There are huge openings for research and theory in IT governance, enterprise architecture, business/IT alignment, and more. Where is it? Thoughts? Am I missing something?

-ctb

P.S. One exception I must note is Christopher Verhoef and his work on Quatitative IT portolio management. Paradoxically, this appeared in the ACM Journal Science of Computer Programming. Great article, but the publication choice makes NO sense at all to me - this is the kind of thing I would expect to see in an MIS-focused journal.

BPMI/OMG alignment

Time makes more converts than reason...

The OMG continues to display formidable organizational momentum, with this BPMI announcement. Two years ago, the then-BPMI leadership (i.e. Howard Smith) wanted little if anything to do with the OMG. With DMTF and BPMI established as partners, the OMG is clearly the leading semantic standards organization for the IT-ERP domain. Now if we could just get them to explicitly lay claim to a CMDB (or better yet, ITSM) standard...

-ctb

Boris Pevzner (Centrata) blog - best I've seen

A major tip of the hat to Boris Pevzner's blog - his stuff is so good I'm tempted to pack it in (well, not really :-). In particular he points out the IT Governance Institute (a partner of ISACA, the publisher of COBIT) and their updated Board Briefing on IT Governance.

Note that ISACA is a membership organization with chapters, which boosts it a notch in my view, placing it on the same level as DAMA, ITSMF, the Integration Consortium, and similar organizations composed of in the trenches professionals doing real IT work.

-Charlie

A logical model for IT governance

NOTE: The final version of this initial post (including definitions) is here.

Public DRAFT - comments requested.

Problems worthy of attack
Prove their worth by hitting back.
-Piet Hein

This post will be a work in progress for a while. Unlike many weblog authors, I continue to revise my posts for some time after initial publication based on feedback & further thought. This is because this weblog is essentially a vehicle for a book, and the longer posts are chapters.

Here is an overall logical model/metamodel that integrates IT Service Management and metadata concepts (click for full size).

continued...

Excellent CFO magazine article on ERP for IT

CFO Magazine has a great new article: "What, Where, and How Much? New software may help companies understand the true scope and cost of IT infrastructure." It's a cutting-edge look at the ERP for IT problem (they even use that term) - of course, I may be biased because I'm quoted in it. As you might gather from the title, the audience is financial executives, not technologists.

The article quotes analysts who use the terms "ERP for IT," "IT resource-planning systems," or "integrated IT management." One thing that is missing is any reference to IT Service Management. This industry is still in some fundamental churn about what to call basic concepts - are ERP for IT and IT Service Management the same things?

I think not at this point; from what I've seen, there is not enough robustness in IT Service Management around enterprise architecture, project portfolio management and the software development lifecycle. But there's no question that for the ultimate success of ERP for IT as described in this article, integration with ITSM processes, concepts, and tools will be essential.

-Charlie

Why I'm posting again

Some inquiring minds are asking offline why I'm posting again, and what some of my cryptic remarks over the previous months meant...

A legal precedent involving a data model

Some amateur analysis and summarization of Assessment Technologies of WI LLC v. Wiredata Inc, posted on Alan Wernick's site:

- The data model can be copyrighted

- Copyright to the data inputted into the data model is not automatically granted to the creator of the data model, if someone else enters the data

- Reports run against the data in the data model to extract the data are not subject to any copyrights on the data model.

This last is interesting, because reports are defined in part by the structure of the data to be reported, at a very detailed level. So, even though there is a tightly coupled dependency of the report on the copyrighted data structure, intellectual property rights do not flow across that dependency. Reports are not a derivative work of the data model, in summary. (Fascinating, the more I think about it...)

For what it's worth. I am not licensed to practice law and this should in no way be construed as anything but a casual reading by a non-lawyer of some detailed legal analysis.

-Charlie

How to govern distributed IT?

So, one current meme is that centralized IT staff will increasingly be decentralized out to line of business embedded positions. This jibes with Nick Carr's thesis that the CIO title is akin to "VP of Electricity," a position that some turn of the century corporations did in fact have.

One question: Where does this leave the whole conversation we've been having around IT Governance? How do you govern something distributed?

-Charlie

Intellectual property specialist lawyer

Alan Wernick (chair of the Intellectual Property and Information Technology Group for the law firm of Querrey & Harrow Ltd) gave a great presentation at the recent DAMA/Wilshire in Orlando. I had the chance to visit with him briefly afterwards. He has a website. Interesting link: "Rights In A Database Don't Extend To Inputted Information, Court Held"

-Charlie

Fundamentals of integration metadata IV: An integration metamodel

Entire series:

Part 1: Delving into the concept of IT "system"

Part 2: Tracing the integration spiderweb

Part 3: Software deployment

Part 4: An integration metamodel

Finally, here is an overall logical metamodel for your EAI competency (click for larger). The principles underlying this metamodel have been proven in practice in a full-service Integration Competency Center (although let me be clear that there is a long distance from this logical representation, which draws heavily on open OMG standards, to an operational physical persistence architecture, with many different ways to realize it!):

Continued...

Greatest hits

For those who may be recent subscribers to this blog/email list, a little background: I started this blog as essentially a simple means to collect various thoughts that may be at some point compiled into a book. While I do the standard blogger ranting and raving and pointing to various things, some of the postings are pretty in depth, with graphics, examples, and so on. 

I have compiled links to some of these more substantive articles as a "Greatest Hits" section on the right hand side of the blog; here for your convenience is the current list:

CMDB Chaos and Confusion: Making Sense of the Madness

Review: ITIL Application Management Volume

A metadata rant

IT reporting: Why it's the same, why it's different

A story of too many tools

Fundamentals of integration metadata

A CMDB rant

IT portfolios, service catalogs, and enterprise architecture

Model Driven Configuration Management

-Charlie

Looking for IBM "Yellow" books

I keep hearing rumors of the legendary IBM "Yellow" books, aka the "Information Systems Management Architecture" series. Does anyone out there have these, or know of a library or document depository that does?

James Governor's blog, & CA

Liking James Governor's blog a lot. In particular he (as well as Dennis Gaughan at AMR) are pointing out that CA's acquisition of Niku is part of an ambitious program to remake CA and position it as a comprehensive ERP for IT vendor.

I had heard this was in the works for CA last year at the 2004 DAMA national, but I have not covered it much on this blog due to simple skepticism, so there it is. Good to keep an eye on, but I for one am expecting execution issues (having witnessed the complete inability of CA to upgrade ErWin 3.5 to 4.0).

50,000 hits

50,000 hits and counting as of today.

Federated CMDB: dimensionality is key

"Let's put all of IT's data into one database and call it a CMDB!"

"Okay! Wait, this is too hard!"

"Then let's keep it in several databases and call it a 'Federated CMDB'!"

"Okay! That's easier! Wait - why are we calling it a CMDB at all?"

...

Integration Competency Center, the book

Informatica has published a most excellent book (co-authored by my former boss John Schmidt) on establishing an Integration Competency Center:

Press release

Amazon link

Addresses metadata within the context of an ICC quite comprehensively.

CA buys Niku

Whoa, this is big and somewhat ugly: Computer Associates has purchased Niku.

The reason I call it ugly is that CA has a long and deserved reputation for purchasing packages, milking the revenue, and not enhancing them. Expect a significant exodus from Niku.

Distributed configuration management: a success story

Joe, Chris, and Sue were talking over the coffee break at a local IT service management professional meeting...

Joe: "Our senior leadership is all charged up about ITIL, but configuration management is killing us. We're pretty well managed in terms of desktops and their configurations, and now they want us to move into the data center. We're really struggling with how detailed to go with servers and applications, and even more troubling, how to collect the initial inventory of whatever we do decide to track."

ITIL & related blog

Liking Chris Jablonski's stuff here. My hands remain tied - t minus 8 days and counting.

New subtitle

I have changed the subtitle of this weblog from

Managing information systems

to

Architecting IT Governance

This I think throws into sharper focus the purpose of this blog. "Managing information systems" hearkens back to MIS (i.e. "Management Information Systems") which is quite an outdated term in the industry. (Not that appearing outdated necessarily bothers me -- IT is too much of a fashion show anyways). The important point is that this blog is not about ALL things MIS/IT but rather the particular issue of "how to efficiently and effectively architect, automate and support internal IT business processes." The term "IT Governance" has emerged as a useful shorthand in the past 12 months, one I'm adopting frequently in presenting and writing, so consider this a vote of confidence for whoever coined it.

Expect more postings in a few weeks - counting down to June 10th for reasons I'll go into then.

-Charlie

My DAMA presentation

I'll be presenting at DAMA/Wilshire this week; my presentation entitled "Data, Metadata, and ITIL" is here.

Paul Strassman

I've appreciated Paul Strassman's work on IT investment and governance for years, but have not said so in this forum previously. If you are in IT management, you simply must acquaint yourself with his work - it's head and shoulders above the rest.

http://www.strassmann.com/

Borland CTO blog

Patrick Kerpan, http://blogs.borland.com/pjkerpan/

He mentions Niku and Mercury, indicating Borland's desire to integrate their application lifecycle products with these governance solutions.

He also says some nice things about Avalanche.

-ctb

IT Toolbox blogs

Wow, what a wealth of first-hand IT narrative - good stuff:

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/?d=bloggers

Application Services Library

This article led me to the Application Services Library, which is being seen as a competitor to ITIL, focusing on an application - not service - management perspective. Most interesting.

-ctb

Prune IT Systems, Not Budgets

Very worthwhile article, quick 2 page read, here. Do you have your application portfolio baselined yet?

"Lack of Enterprise Architecture" cited as reason for FBI software failure

This weblog's readers may be aware of the FBI's massive Trilogy software project failure. The audit report on this is posted here. Interestingly, it cites "Lack of an Enterprise Architecture" as a key contributing factor.

ERP for IT in St. Louis

Last Thursday (1/26) I was priviliged to present to the St. Louis DAMA, on "Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology." My presentation is here: Download erp4itStLouis.zip

DMTF and OMG announce partnership

The Distributed Management Task Force and the Object Management Group will be collaborating to platform the DMTF standards on the OMG's metamodels.

http://www.dmtf.org/newsroom/releases/2004_12_13

This is big news, for those of you following this space. This is the clearest roadmap yet to a CMDB standard, and may well render the DCML effort moot.

IT Portfolio Management Facility in finalization

The Object Management Group has posted the IT Portfolio Management Facility as a final adopted specification. I guess there's still a finalization phase to iron out any remaining issues.

If you're looking for an object model for your CMDB, this is an excellent place to start: directly implementable, yet concise, described in an industry standard syntax (UML). When they get further they will post the XML Metadata Interchange file, which will make it importable into many UML tools (from which class models can be generated).

OMG specs are noted for their depth and rigor, and in my opinion this one sets a high bar for others working in this space to meet - not that it's perfect. If I have time, I'll dig into it in a little more depth.

-ctb

25,000 hits and one year

I just topped 25,000 cumulative hits today, and the one year anniversary a few days back. Thanks for all of your interest. That's an average of 500 hits a week, not bad for an unsponsored, part-time steam outlet.

Keep in touch,

Charlie

Excellent Holton/Alloo article on IT tooling

Comprehensive, cross-functional overview reflecting good insight into the confusing IT tools market and how it is evolving:

http://www.ftponline.com/special/opsmgmt/overview/default.asp

Kudos to authors Glenn Helton and Page Alloo.

-ctb

CMDB Chaos and Confusion: Making Sense of the Madness

(Updated this post 10/29/2004, as it is getting so much attention.)

The ITIL concept of the Configuration Management Database has provoked great confusion in enterprise IT circles. Research firms are weighing in, the trade press is trying to make sense of it, and the vendors are tripping over each other in their haste to brand whatever data stores they have as “CMDBs.”

Terry Moriarty saw it coming

Credit where due - Terry Moriarty in this 1998 article asserted that the metadata repository is the data store for configuration management.

-Charlie

ADML: A good idea come and gone too soon?

I only found out about ADML, the Architecture Description Modeling Language, over lunch the other day with a friend involved in the Open Group. Haven't dug into it, but my friend said it was moribund -- too darn bad, if true.

-ctb

Some notes on ITMSF USA 2004

I attended the IT Service Management Forum USA Conference & Expo 2004 in Long Beach, California last week, taking in three full days of conference sessions, vendor presentations, and keynotes. It was a good conference; interesting presentations and lots of energy. IT Service Management, and the ITSMF as an organization, are evolving quickly and the sense of momentum was palpable.

UML/IDEF comparison/contrast

Here. Looks good; haven't digested fully.

-ctb

Letter to Parry Aftab

(Parry is "The Privacy Lawyer" for Information Week and has called for the creation of a "Data Map" to manage privacy.)

Hi Parry,

I enjoyed your article "It's time to build a data map." I have referenced it favorably on my weblog www.erp4it.com.

My perspective is that what you call for should not be done episodically (e.g. through a periodic audit process) but rather should be intrinsic in how the IT organization is managed...

Couple new vendors

Tideway: "Tideway Foundation automatically tracks crucial server, database and application interdependencies previously un-economic to map. It is the cornerstone of any effective service-oriented architecture." Sounds like an Appilog/Relicore/Troux competitor. The "Reasoning Engine" with application fingerprinting is what you really need for conclusive scanning of an environment; one hopes that the user can easily create their own fingerprints. They look very complete; add a data dictionary and you'd really have something, that is, assuming they are a real software product and not vaporware or services masquerading as product.

UMT: "UMT drives customer value by providing project and application portfolio management solutions that prioritize, optimize, and overcome constraints." Appears to be mostly about project portfolio management; saw little if anything about application management.

-ctb

20,000+ hits

This weblog passed the 20,000th cumulative hit (in about 10 months) sometime last week. Thank you for all your interest and all the supportive emails! I do try to answer what I receive, so stay in touch.

IT lawyer calls for "Data Map" to manage privacy

A must-read article for the data managers among us. From an ITIL perspective, clearly points up why you can't separate metadata management from configuration management. You have to know both what the data is, and the configuration relationships of the assets managing it, in order to meet such legal requirements for assuring customer privacy.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=26805652

I continue to be optimistic that centralized data management will make a comeback, with pressures like this building.

-ctb

An ITIL conflict of interest?

One little-appreciated issue with ITIL/ITSM suites is the question of who, within the enterprise, owns and operates them.

Consider this:

Who owns your financial processes? Probably your Finance group. But who owns your General Ledger system? Probably your IT group charged with building and running it. This separation of concerns is seen as a good thing by auditors and others concerned with checks and balances...

Presentation for Fall ITSMF

My presentation for this fall's ITSMF is here.

Been translated into Russian

My review of the ITIL Application Management volume Part 1 and Part 2 have been translated into Russian here. Kind of cool to see my name in Cyrillic characters.

ITSMF 2004

FYI all, here is a conference I'll be speaking at (dedicated presentation and a panel appearance):

http://www.jupiterevents.com/itsmf/fall04/

I'm quite proud to have gotten "metadata" explicitly onto the ITSMF agenda.

-Charlie

BMC releases new config/change tools

Interesting news here. A "standards-based CMDB?" Which standards?

Scott Ambler on Model Driven Architecture

Scott Ambler has been a prominent critic of the OMG's Model-Driven Architecture, but has started to examine some scenarios for "Agile MDA" here.

I think many of Scott's insights are useful, and admire his sense of history - it's rare to see people of our generation understand the history of CASE. One thing he doesn't make the connection on - the OMG's MDA can trace its lineage directly back to the failure of 1980s CASE tools, via interim standards such as CDIF, AD/Cycle, PCTE, and IRDS.

Effective data management: focus on the process

Newcomers to this blog, and my friends in the IT Service Management community, may not realize the challenges faced by the discipline of data management. In order to effectively manage an enterprise's data, robust control points are required so that the contents of all databases are effectively documented and their structures are built to standards...

Best metadata articles of the year so far

John Singer of Mastercard wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of "Metadata Repository Redux" in DM Review Direct. This is the best metadata writing I've read all year; concise (3 pages each) yet rich. Highly recommended; covers the "use cases" for metadata -- "common patterns of process and technology." This man has lived the problem and thought deeply about it. "Twenty-first century metadata management for IT has morphed into knowledge and content management with the goal of capturing, classifying, and categorizing all things IT."

'Nuff said.

-ctb

Interview with Rachel Chalmers

Excellent interview with Rachel Chalmers of the 451 Group here. This is a group to watch; considerable depth of ERP for IT understanding evident.

Extending UML for enterprise architecture

Interesting article here.

Starting my Semantic Web journey

It's apparent that I need to understand more about the Semantic Web and how it may impact the evolution of standards for the enterprise IT problem domain. Here is an interesting article for starters, from Enterprise Architect. Note the skepticism of one presenter, for what appears to be similar reasons to my own.

Same newsletter, different article: notice that David Linthicum's presention here seems to imply that metadata will be RDF-based.

ITIL Data Management volume

I finally broke down and purchased the online copy of the ITIL "Data Management" volume. This is part of their "Back Catalogue," available through TSO. (Data management is in volume 2, "The complementary guidance set.")

I was going to write a longer review of this 170-page volume, but it is simply so good that all I can say is Buy It, if you are in data management, or an IT Service Manager trying to figure out where Data Management might fit in. (Unfortunately the price is a little high, and you get 6 other books you may not need.) It's an excellent, thoughtful, concise yet nuanced overview of Data Management, covering...

ITIL Application Management review part two: Tooling and technical discussion

Here is the second part of my review of the ITIL “Gold” volume on Application Management. (First part.)

This part is concerned with the architectural implications for tools, processes, and data structures implied by this volume.

The application portfolio, as depicted in this volume, is itself an information system, database-based, which stores attributes about applications that are enterprise assets. Its purpose is to “fully realise the benefits of their IT investments.”

On the question “what is an application,” the volume defines it as “the software program(s) that perform those specific functions that directly support the execution of business functions, processes, and/or procedures. Applications, along with data and infrastructure components, such as hardware, the operating system, and middleware, make up the technology components of IT systems that in turn are part of an IT service.”

The reader is encouraged to examine this article from my “Fundamentals of Integration Metadata” series for technical background on precisely defining the concept of application. Note that distinguishing between application, data, infrastructure, and middleware may be easier said than done…

Books on auditing IT

Was surprised to see so many books on this (although in hindsight with Sarbanes-Oxley it would be predictable). The drive to audit and control IT can only assist in the goals espoused by this weblog.

Auditing Information Systems, by Jack Champlain (2003)

Information Systems Control and Audit by Ron A. Weber (1998)

Core Concepts of Information Technology Auditing by James Hunton et al (2003)

and so on (you can see related titles on Amazon).

Computas - merging Enterprise Architecture with IT Asset Management

Computas seems to be on the right track with their recent efforts to combine Enterprise Architecture with what they are calling Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC). They are starting from the visual modeling tool space, appearing to be a Popkin competitor.

Cognizant - Application Portfolio Management leader

Just came across Cognizant, in particular this presentation. Hot stuff. Quantitative application portfolio management based on IT service management; the real deal. (See this paper by Verhoef for a rigorous overview.) The paper emphasizes (as do I) that most IT money goes to operations and support/maintenance, implication being that application portfolio management is more of a priority than project portfolio management. They also mention the portfolio management practice at Merrill Lynch and even use the word "meta data" (more who are seeing the convergence in IT management...)

One implication of all such efforts: only a mature operational shop can benefit. If you don't have your projects, systems, incidents/problems, and maintenance efforts all working from the same common set of applications and projects, you'll never get the numbers together to support quantitative application portfolio managment (QAPM, to coin a new acronym).

Comments on PeopleSoft Enterprise Service Automation

Signed up and downloaded 5 documents on PeopleSoft's Enterprise Service Automation for IT solution, their vector into the space this weblog covers...

ITM goes live with "ERP for CIOs"

From Computerworld:

ITM Software Corp. this week launched an integrated suite of IT management applications that early users and consultants said is something akin to an ERP system for CIOs. [...article]

(ITM press release)

I would love to see a metamodel for their "Seven Pillars of IT Knowledge." I'm betting they are something like:

Application Systems & Components
Hardware Devices
Personnel
Projects
Processes
Incidents & Changes
Databases

which of course would turn them into a repository. Anyone know?

-ctb

ERP for IT paper takes 3rd place at EAIIC

My paper and presentation on Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology took 3rd place in the papers competition at the Enterprise Application Integration Industry Consortium meeting last week in Banff, Canada. A pleasant surprise, as I felt the paper was off the beaten track for the conference and really didn't think I was in the running.

Furthering the DCML debate

Anonymous comment posted in response to my DCML critique, an excellent springboard for further discussion:

I think the idea would be that companies who want to play with DCML will use a product (tivoli, HP, etc.) and will require the compliance of that product with DCML. This would simply force the vendors to adopt an RDF transform layer or some such (if they were to play nice in this space as well).

BTW, are you suggesting that people use straight up SQL for this type of data structure or UML? It seems like you're arguing both (and yes, I see UML having trouble gaining acceptance in large scale enterprises for development efforts, much less most things outside of that realm (read: IT asset representation, etc.))

Two new organizations, ITPI and ESPI

Readers may be interested in these two organizations:

Information Technology Process Institute
"The Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI), a not for profit organization, is engaged in three principal areas of activity, Research, Benchmarking and the Development of prescriptive guidance for practitioners and business executives. The ITPI has collaboration agreements in place with research organizations such as The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and faculty in The University of Oregon Decision Sciences Department. We are currently working to create prescriptive guidance that solves the common objectives of IT Security, Corporate Governance, Audit and Operations. Through Research, Development and Benchmarking the ITPI creates powerful measurement tools, prescriptive adoption methods and control metrics to facilitate management by fact."

ESPI Foundation
"ESPI Foundation promotes good software and systems engineering practice in Europe through the adoption of process improvement. We provide information to assist those starting out on the process improvement journey, and facilitate exchange of knowledge and experience between practicing organisations.

In the role of mediator between practicing organisations and service suppliers we work with the SEI to stage the annual European SEPG conference, and promote training provided by third parties to support process improvement activities."

DCML Framework published

A draft version (0.11) of the foundational framework for Data Center Markup Language (DCML) has been published.

Portfolio Management Forum

I was wondering when the portfolio management community would start to create an online identity; here is one (sponsored by Prosight and Fujitsu): www.portfoliomgt.org.

I'm still wondering when and how the IT portfolio management movement will engage with the enterprise architecture movement. I believe that IT portfolio management is emerging partially in response to the continued disregard of the enterprise architecture community for fundamental issues of IT financials.
There are plenty of enterprise architecture articles gatewayed through this site, so it's clear that people are thinking about this.

I have the same question re: IT portfolio management vs. IT service management, there are also overlaps here in theory (IT Finance being an ITIL practice area, but a less-discussed one in my experience.) There are relatively few ITSM-focused articles gatewayed through this website, which is surprising.

-Charlie

PS. This site has a lot of pointers to external articles (including mine) which are then wrapped in its own architecture, including a relevance survey. (Wonder if they are violating any IP rights?)

Intel wins this year's Wilshire Metadata Award

From Tony Shaw, and not to be missed:

http://www.wilshireconferences.com/award/index.htm

"All original nominations, as well as judges comments and questions, are available at:
http://www.wilshireconferences.com/award/2004/winner-finalists.htm"

Good paper on IT Portfolio Management

Like this paper by C. Verhoef; a rigorous look at IT Portfolio Management.

Mercury to buy Appilog

I've noted previously that Mercury Interactive is moving aggressively in the ERP for IT space. Their acquisition of Appilog further strengthens their portfolio supporting internal IT business process. See

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/DocView.asp?did=796025&fid;=1725
http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=5620

The discovery-based topological mapping capabilities of Appilog will be an essential part of any ERP for IT solution, as they provide real-time configuration status accounting and a means to audit the actual configuration against the documented configuration. Look for Appilog's competitors Relicore, Collation, Cendura, and Troux to also be takeover targets; especially Relicore, which has some very advanced technology in this space.

Managing the IT portfolio at Merrill Lynch

Is it a CMDB? A metadata repository? They don't call it either; it's the "IT Data Warehouse."

System Transformation Portal

Here's a company worth a look:

http://www.systemtransformation.com

Legacy transformation, with reference to OMG work in the area.

Metadata + management framework: the basis for ERP for IT

Thought for the day:

The first successful ERP for IT system will be built on a combination of a metadata repository (Rochade, Adaptive, etc) and a management framework (Unicenter, OpenView, Tivoli, etc). The management framework is the best and most accepted way to instrument and scan an IT infrastructure, and most support ITSM to some degree; a metadata repository would provide a sound foundation of information architecture and a bridge to the software development lifecycle.

Gartner on Application Portfolio Management

Gartner is doing webcasts on Application Portfolio Management with a free downloadable Powerpoint here. The presentation is interesting and clearly starts to show the overall analytic direction of APM, beyond simply baselining an inventory.

"Universal Meta Data Models" - review of Marco/Jennings

Was first in line for David Marco's and Michael Jennings' new book on metadata and have now spent some time with it. Let me say immediately that this book is an essential for the modern metadata professional, and in my world this also includes those of you doing configuration management or IT portfolio management. All in all, there is much of value in the work; careful thought and analysis is evident and the material makes solid efforts in grappling with modern challenges such as Web services.

The ITIL Application Management Volume: A much-needed bridge between software engineering and ITSM

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library, self-described as “the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world,” is living up to that claim and becoming increasingly influential in defining best practices for the modern, well-run enterprise IT organization. The best-known ITIL volumes are the "Red" Service Delivery volume and the “Blue” Service Support volume, which together comprise the gateway through which most new ITIL initiates pass.

These volumes focus on topics such as Configuration, Change, Incident, Problem, and Release Management; IT Finance; Capacity Management; and other topics regarding the large-scale IT operation. However, there is an expanded ITIL color palette, and the full IT Service Management picture does not emerge until one takes into account the other major ITIL volumes:

-Application Management
-Software Asset Management
-Planning to Implement Service Management
-ICT Infrastructure Management
-Security Management
-and the forthcoming volume The Business Perspective

This is a review of the “Gold” or “Yellow” Application Management volume, a significant, boundary-breaking book that bridges the gap between “build” and “run,” and should be required reading for both development and service managers.

A metadata rant

Repurposed from a dm-discuss post.

Let me be a little contrarian and argue first (as head of the Metadata Management Office at a Fortune 100 company, and the manager of a modern MOF-based metadata repository) that

the terms "metadata" and "repository" are quite useless and need to be left behind.

Weblog metrics

This weblog recently had its 10,000th hit, and is routinely seeing over 300 hits a day. Don't know the ratio of repeat to new readers.

-ctb

IT portfolios, service catalogs, and enterprise architecture

Been thinking more and more about the relationship between these concepts:

- IT portfolios (application, project)
- Service catalogs
- Enterprise architecture

IT portfolio management coverage

Background: Charlie's take on app vs. proj portfolio management.

Like this article by Ephraim Schwartz at Infoworld. He discusses Niku (with their new Clarity suite) as an example of top-down IT project portfolio management, while BluePhoenix is bottom-up. (Hadn't heard of BluePhoenix before.)

Metadata and IT Service Management presentation

Here is my presentation for DAMA/Wilshire 2004, on Metadata and IT Service Management.

-ctb

Niku makes ERP for IT play

Niku, the manufacturer of project management software (originally ABT Workbench) has recently introduced a new suite called Clarity. Via Gartner-sponsored webcast on KnowledgeStorm, this suite is explicitly being positioned as an ERP for IT solution. (The webcast is free if you sign up.) It has an attractive-appearing portal architecture and clearly is moving beyond simple project and program management.

Metadata research firm

A new player in the metadata market, Gavilan Research Associates, is doing some very good vendor research at http://www.metadataresearch.com. Tell Stu that Charlie sent you.

-ctb

IT reporting: Why it's the same, why it's different

This article gives me a chance to post a picture of my son:

.

Thanks, yes I know he's cute. He's a happy boy :-). What I want to draw your attention to is the Skwish(tm) toy he's holding.

I want to talk a little bit about the reporting side of ERP for IT. Been talking a lot about technicalities, that at the end of the day don't mean much unless they enable information to be presented to leadership.

Euclid - Finally, a firm that gets ERP for IT

Here's a new Silicon Valley/Hyderabad startup, Euclid. They have among the clearest ERP for IT messages I've yet seen; definitely the first vendor I've seen referencing metadata, COBIT, and ITIL.

Running IT like a business - Computerworld

Here's a good article from ComputerWorld, "Challenges of Running IT Like a Business."

A story of too many tools, part 2: Back to the future

A story of too many tools, part 2: Back to the future

First installment

It’s five years later, and our story continues. The shop is now recognized industrywide as a leader in integrated IT service management. Al (the former ITSM/ERP consultant) is now VP for IS Operations, talking to a review team from an industry partner sent to learn some lessons. The scene opens in a conference room with Al presenting…

Model Driven Configuration Management

Configuration Management is a key part of IT Service Management. The major process frameworks (ITIL, COBIT, CMM) all call for it. According to ITIL, Configuration Management's goals are to “account for all the IT assets and configurations within the organisation and its services.” What’s in scope? All applications, components, databases, servers, message queues, ETL jobs, and so forth become CIs, or Configuration Items.

This essay examines the particular issue of Configuration Item identification: how is it that CIs are first identified? As an extension of the Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture, the concept of Model Driven Configuration Management is proposed.

Agilense & Inspired

Was just pointed (by Alert Reader Roy Roebuck) to a lightweight enterprise architecture tool, Agilense's EA solution, which is in turn based on technology from Inspired.org. These folks clearly get the problem domain; but scanners and integration into the broader configuration management space appear lacking.

I found the following assertion provocative: "Enterprise Architecture has two major categories of activity, decision-support and change management or governance." Hmm.

-ctb

Couple more ITSM forums

Here's a couple more forums of people talking ITSM stuff:

http://forums.datamation.com/
http://www.itilpeople.com/forum/

-Charlie

ITM adds two more modules

ITM Software has added two more modules, Vendor Relationship Management and Human Capital Management. This takes their product suite in a slightly different direction than I'd anticipated. I am still wondering what their vision is for their central repository, the Foundation, which "establishes a comprehensive IT inventory and serves as a common base of IT knowledge that all the application modules leverage." What I don't get is how they can have this without starting with Configuration or Metadata Management.

-ctb

Fundamentals of integration metadata III: software deployment

Entire series:

Part 1: Delving into the concept of IT "system"

Part 2: Tracing the integration spiderweb

Part 3: Software deployment

Part 4: An integration metamodel

The following question was recently posted to the ITSM list (that’s IT Service Management Forum, http://en.itsmportal.net/content/discussie)

When modeling the CMDB I understand that each distinct piece of hardware (e.g. each host) is modeled as a single CI and also each software package (e.g. Apache Web Server). What I cannot find an answer to is if each instantiation of a software package is also (usually) modeled as a single CI and what the implications of doing so or not doing so are...

An open source, MOF-compliant metadata repository (or CMDB?)

So, you've been hearing about XMI and would like to base your company's metadata practice on open standards. But the entrance price of the major MOF-compliant repositories is too steep? And you have access to a talented Java software engineer? Read on...

Great UML/MDA blog

Check out Mike Burba's blog. Lots to like there (and not just the plug for my blog!)

Project Avalanche: Sourceforge as Industrial Cooperative

Here's an interesting concept: Avalanche, with a vision for shared source among enterprise IT shops. SourceForge as an industrial cooperative (a business model with a long and distinguished history in Minnesota).

Anyone else out there using COBIT?

Of the three major frameworks getting a lot of mindshare nowadays - ITIL and CMM being the other two - COBIT is the only one to recognize data management as key to running IT. (I've been quite disappointed in CMM and ITIL for this reason; neither one seems to have any awareness of the particular disciplines and issues around data architecture and management.)

If your company is trying to address SOX and looking for a framework, I highly recommend COBIT. Not that it's mutually exclusive with ITIL or CMM; they all cover somewhat different areas - but again, only COBIT really pays attention to data. They even mention data models, repositories, and data dictionaries!

See http://www.isaca.org/.

-Charlie

Fundamentals of integration metadata II: Tracing the spiderweb

This is the second installment of my "fundamentals of integration metadata" series.

Entire series:

Part 1: Delving into the concept of IT "system"

Part 2: Tracing the integration spiderweb

Part 3: Software deployment

Part 4: An integration metamodel

Now that we have discussed the basic concepts around "system" and looked at some industry standard data structures for representing systems/applications, let's turn to our first look at how to document their interconnections.

Interesting history on the Microsoft Repository

Here's a good article from 2000 on the Microsoft Repository at the time. Useful history, especially with Microsoft's renewed rejection of OMG partnership. Note that a technical concept which was described by Microsoft as "not a workable solution" is now successfully being sold by Adaptive Inc. and Metamatrix; Informatica has a competing product coming online as well.

UmlAsOoErd

Martin Fowler is another noted professional raising various critiques of the OMG's Model Driven Architecture. One interesting insight of his has been partitioning the UML community by usage: UMLAsSketch, UMLAsBlueprint, and UMLAsProgrammingLanguage.

I would propose a fourth, probably orthogonal concept: UMLAsOoErd (UmlAsOoDdl or UmlAsOql also came to mind.)

New ERP for IT vendor on the watchlist

A new vendor has emerged, with a CIO-targeted, top-down vision: ITM Software...

Fundamentals of integration metadata I: Delving into the concept of "application"

Note: This is the first installment in my Fundamentals of Integration Metadata series. It is a foundation piece, delving into the concept of system which is a key structuring mechanism in understanding the IS environment.

Entire series:

Part 1: Delving into the concept of "application"

Part 2: Tracing the integration spiderweb

Part 3: Software deployment

Part 4: An integration metamodel

Overheard in the halls of Fortune 500 IT shops every day...

"PLV is down!"
"Quadrex isn't talking to the IC hub!"
"We're doing a capacity upgrade on the NST databases."
"The X-time batch was late two hours today."

What is meant by such gibberish?

Microsoft takes stand against MDA

Steve Cook (recently of IBM, now of Microsoft) has published a significant critique of the OMG standards, outlining Microsoft's approach to model-driven development.

DAMA/Wilshire 2004

Well, I've been selected for not one but two appearances at THE 8TH ANNUAL Wilshire Meta-Data Conference AND THE 16TH ANNUAL DAMA International Symposium - a dedicated presentation and an appearance (which I was quite honored to accept) on the yearly Next Big Thing panel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'll be continuing to promote my view that metadata and IT Service Management are converging at breakneck speed into a common ERP for IT capability.

Hope to see you there.

-Charlie

ITSM Forum 2004

The IT Service Management Forum 2004 will be in Long Beach, California Septermber 27 - October 2. (This is not the governmental version happening Feb 2004). The Call for Presentations is out, deadline is March 5th.

See you there!

Can ITSM be agile?

Those attentive to current debates in software engineering and around the software development lifecycle are probably aware of the emerge of "agile" methods such as eXtreme Programming (XP).

More great ITSM articles on Datamation

Some of the best ITSM coverage continues to come out of Datamation, have a look. Especially like the Top ITIL Myths by Gene Kim.

DMTF/OMG alignment, finally!

A Usually Reliable Government Source has informed me that the DMTF is finally set on aligning its metamodels with standard OMG semantics...

Making lemonade out of IT mandates

Regulatory and other Board-level mandates such as business continuity are a popular topic this year in enterprise IT, mostly accompanied by grumbling about the resources involved in allegedly non-value-add activity. However, I would argue that if such initiatives are framed correctly, they can add immense value indeed...

DMTF Server Management effort

The Distributed Management Task Force has announced the formation of a Server Management Working Group, to further develop the DMTF standards...

A story of too many tools

A story from a large IT shop not too far from here…

A CMDB rant

The following is an excerpt from a cross-posted email, summarizing some of my concerns around current CMDB practices...

We shouldn't need Configuration Management black belts

More evidence that the theoretical critique of current CMDBs is reflected in people's practical difficulties:

Is UML heading for fragmentation?

I just noticed this article in Application Development Trends, interesting discussion of UML evolution with particular attention to compliance issues.

ITIL data exchange

This workshop at the recent St. Louis ITSMF caught my eye:

10:00am-10:50am Building Bridges: An ITIL Powered Data Exchange ...

Trying to understand UML for Systems Engineering…

I’ve been tracking a new OMG standard called the UML for Systems Engineering. The Request for Proposal (RFP) stage has just closed, with one submission from a pretty powerful group of OMG members. The question I’m trying to understand: will this new standard advance the erp4it concept? Digging into the issue, I found yet more standards converging on the same set of issues…

Journal of Software and Systems Modeling

The Journal of Software and Systems Modeling is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering modeling languages, including UML.

ERP for IT article in BI Journal

My BI Journal article is now published online.

As WS-I is to the W3C, ___ is to the OMG…

The Web Services Interoperability Organization is a new kind of standards effort, one worth looking into as a model...

ERP for IT article published

This month's BI Journal (November) has my ERP for IT article published. Don't go looking for it online yet as they lag the web publishing. But look around for it in your respective shops.

More on the repository question

So, what is a repository anyways? ...

Repository proliferation: time for a freeze

As part of my job, I have been reviewing quite a few products for the internal IT market. (Again, for newcomers to this blog, the concern here is not for our business customers, but rather for enterprise IT's own internal processes and the automation solutions being proposed for them.)

The ITSM bible

Banging around on the ITSM portal, I came across this 800-page volume The Guide to IT Service Management Volume 1:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201737922/202-8480018-4832633

Notice that this is Amazon UK. I don't know why it's not available stateside. Only took a week to arrive.

Chapter 31 is the first material I have seen in an ITSM context (besides mine :-) endorsing an OMG MOF-based approach, which makes me very happy. Three profs from the University of Castilla (Spain) used MOF to define a software maintenance metamodel.

-ctb

erp4it mailing list

Greetings all:

I'm creating a new mailing list to support this blog...

Useful resources on Application Portfolio Management

I read the stuff so you don't have to... surfing through several pages of Google links on "Application Portfolio Management," here are the best I've found so far:

More on Application Portfolio Management

It's interesting tracing the various threads related to improving the efficiency of enterprise information technology management. From my perspective it's like being at a huge party with different cliques gathered under various banners, all talking about basically the same thing.

For example, I've just been reviewing Frank Patrick's collection of project portfolio management links. Good stuff - but from a metadata perspective, the concept of application portfolio management is much more interesting, and I wonder how one can really do PPM without APM. This led to some further research and thought.

Overlooked: What is the relationship between DCML and the Microsoft SDM?

This weblog has noted both DCML and Microsoft SDM, but I'm a little sheepish to observe I never asked the question: what is the relationship?

Code Generation Network

A very cool site. The MDA uptake curve is impressive. http://www.codegeneration.net/

Now if only we could get the deployment-centric standards (DMTF, DCML, Microsoft SDM) in line.

A tale of 3 MOFs

There are not one, or two, but THREE standards using the initials MOF, and they are all of interest to this weblog ...

IT Service Management Portal

For those interested in a strong IT Service Management portal...

Data Center Markup Language!

The most important metamodeling news of the year - perhaps

An Alert Reader has pointed out the new initiative for a Data Center Markup Language (DCML)...

The rise and resurrection of enterprise metadata: repository as CMDB

The metadata repository market has seen its share of ups and downs, and when one discusses metadata with IT oldtimers a note of cynicism can easily creep into the conversation . . .

Major players in the current repository market

Are there any metadata repositories left? Is the market extinct? No, not really ... read on.

What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model?

Recommend this article, visible through the metamodel.com site.

Harris Kern Enterprise Computing Institute

I've been noticing a new series of IT-focused books on various executives' shelves with a consistent brand, and I finally took a closer look at one. The brand was "Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute: Solutions for IT Professionals." After about 5 minutes with the website I knew that Harris and his team of collaborators are hoeing the same ground I'm working in this weblog.

The site is http://www.harriskern.com/. There's quite a library of books they've published; I'm very curious if there is any reference to the CMDB/metadata debate.

Two metadata critics

Couple of articles have come up recently in Web searching, both somewhat anti-metadata on their surface...

Business Model Collaboration: Pushing Software Revolution

This is an exceptionally cogent article, with a wide-ranging scope and incisive analysis. 10 out of 10. You'll have to register -- it's worth it!!! Headline feature on the current OMG front web page.

http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?Doc=2003-09/2003-09-biz-model

Microsoft/OMG rapprochement

Worth reading. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1078866,00.asp

IT Portfolio Management intro

This is a good article on the basics of IT Portfolio Management. I am wondering, however, at the project-centric focus...

Microsoft Systems Definition Model: A challenge to the standards community

Any Gentle Readers who also lurk on the OMG's internal lists know that I have been somewhat of a voice in the wilderness there, advocating that the OMG address the increasing momentum of IT Service Management. Microsoft is now moving into this space ...

Integration metadata: Are you Level 5 in metadata and configuration management?

I spent a couple years building a solid data dictionary for Target Corp., work that I thought prepared me well for any metadata challenge. Boy was I wrong...

The challenges of embedded metadata

The concept of embedded metadata is getting a fair amount of traction recently, due to Bill Inmon and other leading thinkers. I'm going to take a contrarian view, however...

Metadata: Knowledge management for IT?

I believe that metadata, with its rigorous information models, might be the salvation for knowledge management at least for IT...

The OMG's Metadata Standards - presentation

Here is my extended presentation on the OMG's Metadata Standards, presented to the Twin Cities section of the Data Management Association, 3/19/2003. (A shorter version was presented at national DAMA in April 2003).

Datamation ITSM articles

Here's a raft of recent articles on ITSM. Some of them bylined from the ITSMF USA conference in St. Louis last month (wish I could have been there). I was wondering where the Datamation brand had went. The whole family of newsletters available through this site is pretty good.

Mercury making big play in IT ERP space

Mercury Interactive, known for its testing tools, is making a big play to be the first soup to nuts ERP for IT vendor. They acquired Kintana and its portfolio of ITSM tools. See this article.

I'll be doing a more thorough review later.

ITScout - fascinating

Just came across ITScout. Fascinating attempt to make sense of the whole industry; there's a lot of high quality work here. You have to register to see the good stuff; I did so and it was worth it.

MDA, ERP/IT, and outsourcing

The fact that GM is interested in ERP for IT primarily to facilitate its outsourcing relationships touched a nerve with at least one reader. This is an important issue for many readers, and probably deserves more than this post - but here's some initial thoughts:

Fundamentals of integration metadata

Just want to announce my next writing project, "Fundamentals of integration metadata." This will be a discussion of how to represent EAI architectures at scale -- a necessary discipline for managing large, interconnected IT environments.

How to model the models: A tale of three formalisms

Recently, EAI expert David Linthicum came to speak at my corporation (promoting his new book), and I was able to discuss with him some concerns I have around the Semantic Web...

A wild rumor on BPMI, and some related thoughts

I have it on very good authority that the Business Process Management Initiative is going to consolidate to some degree with the Object Management Group.

A first look at HP ServiceDesk

I spent a few minutes looking into HP ServiceDesk, a configuration management tool. It's always gratifying to a theorist when practice bears out theory ...

Metadata and IT Service Management

This is the latest version of my Master's thesis . . .

Up and running!

Finally! Up and running. The appearance of this site is the end result of a 2-month odyssey...

The next frontier of enterprise automation

This site is dedicated to the emerging subject of enterprise IT automation, otherwise called Enterprise Resource Planning for IT. This is not the automation of the business by IT; rather it is IT automating itself...

ERP for IT manuscript

Here is the manuscript for ERP for IT as submitted to BI Journal.