| Well, I find it very disturbing from what Shawn stated - "Part of the problem is that there are no good answers to your questions" If the CMDB is really suppose to be the center of the Universe for ITSM, as it shows so well in the BMC literature, how can there be no real good answers? And if ITSM is suppose to be heavily ITIL influenced, how can any company use ITSM and state ITIL is not for me? Isn't that an Oxymoron? You really can't play a game with 15 rules, turn around and state there are no rules. Yes, ITIL is a framework (Pick and choose what you will), however without a foundation, it will collapse. Fine, I'll just turn up the heavy metal music and make my best guess where light bulbs fit into a CI when creating my product categories because not everything is a computer. Thanks, Kevin P. ** Kevin:
This situation is not a ploy to sell services. In its simplest form, the fact is that ITIL adoption is a complex endeavor, and if your organization is not willing to front-load their effort, then ITIL adoption may not be for them. Everything that Chris mentioned is important. Beyond what Chris wrote, it's necessary to understand the thought processes that lead him to write what he did.
If your concern is future usability, then it is necessary to make your very best effort to anticipate what the future needs will be. Only after this process is grossly conlcluded can the CMDB be configured to meet the need. Along with this concept, understand that the expected need will never exactly match the actual future need, and so all you can do is make your best effort.
Just like CQI, ITIL is a journey, not a destination.
Less philosophically, my strongest recommendation to a customer is to not add any new attributes or classes unless there is a demonstrable business need for the new class/attribute. In my experience, customers are often suprised how many CIs can be tracked using simply the BaseElement class. My personal #1 rule of CMDB: unless there is a business need to consume the data, do not store the data in the CMDB. This rule extends to the Product Catalog, in that if there is no need to consume the data, then there is no need to categorize the data.
Also, as Shawn mentioned, if you're using BMC's AM module, you have many restrictions in the day-to-day use of your data, so some of these questions, when pursued to their logical conclusion, will lead you to "it doesn't matter."
Just My $0.02, --Phil |
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