There are some fundamental fallacies behind the arguments for CMDB and a recent article encapsulated a number of them. Why do we keep getting told a CMDB is essential when almost nobody has one?
PM is the engine that moves much stuff (hopefully just about everything) from Development to Production, which is pretty important now that ITIL has muscled into Application Management. PM should interlock with Change Management and Testing. PM should provide most of the Early Life Support. Release and Deployment shouldn't move without PM: if it is big enough to be a release it should be a project. And so on.
Once upon a time IT Service Management was a movement dedicated to improving the levels of service delivered by IT. And ITIL was a body of knowledge put together by the government as a public service and released into the public domain. The books weren't free simply because costs had to be covered.
Now it is turning into just another snake oil peddled by shiny suits.
The first of the five books in the ITIL Version 3 core suite, Service Strategy is ITIL’s bid for credibility outside the back-room. Well actually, much of Version 3 is a cry for acceptance at higher levels in the organisation (or a power grab for more of the business depending on your perspective). But Service Strategy leads the charge, making an effective case for delivery of IT as a service, and for a strategic, analytical and theoretical approach to such delivery.
This is a podcast summarising all the IT Skeptic's arguments about and against the concept of CMDB. You can find out more about this on the IT Skeptic website's CMDB thread, or in the IT Skeptic's new book The IT Skeptic Looks at CMDB
Here is a presentation given to the New Zealand Computer Society on 25th June 2009, on the topic of "Owning ITIL". it covers why ITIL is pretty much always a project, what to watch out for in ITIL projects (ITIL the Cult, ITIl the fad, CMDB can't be done...), what to expect from ITIL.