I'm sure this isn't a popular view point but I've had a rant built up for a while.
This isn't necessarily an anti-Remedy rant - I make my living off of Remedy as much as the next ARS list poster. However, some things are getting zero negative feedback. One of them is ITIL config management and I'm starting to see the diminishing law of returns repeat itself. ITIL is fine to some degree - Incident, Problem, Change, Asset, and SLM type processes all seem valid to me. The CMDB concept does not. The work required to use it far outweighs it's rewards. The CMDB concept now seems to just be the "everything" database. The complexity starts high and as it is added to grows exponentially, especially if "true" config management is being done - establishing and maintaining relationships between all components, people, etc. Implementation time now for some larger customers is in the +18 months with 6 or more people working full time in order to get the whole thing up and running - and that's just to get a "snapshot" of where they were at when they started. No one knows how much it will cost to maintain the whole shooting match going forward. Heck, buying one new model of a PDA for a marketing division can result in the creation of many new custom relationship types plus the administrative work just to actually add those relationships to the particular people affected. I can no longer see this as being a viable business process for large organizations. The time to implement and maintain and the associated costs are just too large. I firmly believe that anyone going down the true config route is going to just waste a ton of money and never improve their actual business efficiency. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
