skeptic's blog

The cure for the common cult of "ITIL by the book"

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2006-08-28 01:17

What a great line: "the cure for the common cult". Oooh, I wish I had thought of that, but I didn't. It comes from a recent article by Brian Johnson, one of the original authors of ITIL and an occasional contributor of comments on this blog.

The key to living without CMDB is process maturity level

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-08-25 01:39

This article has been podcast

Yes you can do without CMDB, so long as you are aiming at not too high a maturity level, say 3. The trick is to remember that you don't adopt a process, you improve it. If we aspire to a moderate level of maturity, then yes we can do without a CMDB. Plenty of people do.

The software analyst industry needs a code of practice.

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2006-08-17 22:52

This article has been podcast

In my country, the broadcast industry and the advertising industry both adhere to a voluntary code of practice to police the more extreme behaviours of their members. I wish the software vendor industry and their parasitic analysts would do the same.

This blog is not a guerilla marketing ploy

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2006-08-15 21:31

Ed said in a recent comment "On your overall views recently and especially today I keep wondering if you're not 'daring' someone to actually tell you how to achieve the coveted CMDB nirvana - maybe we'll hear you doing podcast interviews with the likes of nLayers or Heroix challenging them with your views on the citizen airwaves "

Don't fall for the demo: an asset database with bells and whistles is not a CMDB

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-08-13 22:09

This article has been podcast

Don't fall for the demo: anyone can set up an asset database with enough relationship bells and whistles on it to fool themselves and others that they have a CMDB.

Get it straight: CMDB can not be auto-discovered

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-08-13 02:15

This line in a Butler Group white paper synopsis pressed a button for me:"Service Configuration Management enables quick establishment of Configuration Management Database (CMDB) through auto discovery". I respect the Butler Group more than most analysts, and I am too tight to buy the full text from them, so I hope the synopsis is a bit misleading. Though from the tone of the rest I fear it isn't. This pernicious idea turns up regularly, mostly from software vendors. It must be stamped out.

The pressure on ITIL's future notches up

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2006-08-07 20:57

Further to my "Is ITIL dead in the water?" blog entry about ISO/IEC 20000 developing a life of its own and the center of gravity moving to the USA, the plot thickens. This press release, released today, reveals another potential threat to ITIL's hegemony:

ITIL's CMDB can't be done, no-how

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-08-06 22:02

This discussion of CMDB and its total impracticality has got legs. Let me reinforce two points please: (1) CMDB can't be done because of the data and regardless of the implementation and (2) I'm talking about CMDB as specified by the ITIL books, not any old database. It can't be done.

Living without CMDB

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2006-08-05 09:20

This article has been podcast

CMDB is positioned as the key underpinning foundation to ITIL:

Configuration Management provides the foundation for successful IT Service Management and underpins every other process. The fundamental deliverable is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) [Ref 1]

This is wrong. It is a peripheral nice-to-have. In a previous blog we discussed how it is currently an infeasible nice-to-have. Let's talk about doing without it.

VOIP and the anti-competitive behaviours that would logically induce in a telco

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2006-08-02 10:16

These are ugly times for telcos, a topic I look forward to exploring a little more on this blog. Today's topic is VOIP and the anti-competitive behaviours that would logically induce in a telco. Let me share with you a recent email from my broadband ISP. First some background. My ISP is a telco, the big dominant telco. They also provide me phone lines. Actually they try to pretend they don’t, by branding the ISP arm as an excitingly named subsidiary, but it is a pointless sham really when it all comes on one convenient monthly bill.

Syndicate content