Hi Remedy Guy, While I can understand the situation you're in, it is not right to blame ITIL for this... ITIL does not enforce your business to track all your assets, and it surely does not enforce to populate all CMDB fields you can find. There is no 'true config route'. Just as with everything, there has to be a valid business reason to track information in your CMDB. That means, you have to save more money by keeping track of your assets than the actual paperwork and labor involved in the information costs. For some businesses, this will mean that only servers, applications and licenses will be tracked. For some others, especially when regulations like SOX and stuff like that come into play, it will mean all laptops and blackberries will be tracked as well. Of course, automated discovery tools can help out in keeping information up-to-date. It is absolutely not necessary for a successful CMDB implementation to populate all classes...!
If implementation is +18 months with over 6 people, it will probably tough to prove that it's a wise investment... but it is not impossible, largely depending on your organization. Kind regards, Michiel On 2/22/07, Random Remedy Guy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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"
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