The CMDB Imperative: How to Realize the Dream and Avoid the Nightmares (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Implement Configuration Management Databases that Deliver Rapid ROI and Sustained Business Value

 

Implementing an enterprise-wide Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is one of the most influential actions an IT organization can take to improve service delivery and bridge the gap between technology and the business. With a well-designed CMDB in place, companies are better positioned to manage and optimize IT infrastructure, applications, and services; automate more IT management tasks; and restrain burgeoning costs. Now, there’s an objective, vendor-independent guide to making a CMDB work in your organization. The CMDB Imperative presents a start-to-finish implementation methodology that works and describes how the CMDB is shifting to the superior Configuration Management System (CMS).

 

Expert CMDB industry analyst Glenn O’Donnell and leading-edge architect and practitioner Carlos Casanova first review the drivers behind a CMDB and the technical, economic, cultural, and political obstacles to success. Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of organizations, they present indispensable guidance on architecting and customizing CMDB solutions to your specific environment. They’ll guide you through planning, implementation, transitioning into production, day-to-day operation and maintenance, and much more. Coverage includes

 

• Defining the tasks and activities associated with configuration management
• Understanding the CMDB’s role in ITIL and the relationship between CMDBs and ITIL v3’s CMS
• Building software models that accurately represent each entity in your IT environment
• Ensuring information accuracy via change management and automated discovery
• Understanding the state of the CMDB market and selling the CMDB within your organization
• Creating federated CMDB architectures that successfully balance autonomy with centralized control
• Planning a deployment strategy that sets appropriate priorities and reflects a realistic view of your organization’s maturity
• Integrating systems and leveraging established and emerging standards
• Previewing the future of the CMDB/CMS and how it will be impacted by key trends such as virtualization, SOA, mobility, convergence, and “flexi-sourcing”

 

Foreword     xi

Prologue     xiii

 

Chapter 1: The Need for Process Discipline     1

Chapter 2: What Is a CMDB?     25

Chapter 3: Planning for the CMS     57

Chapter 4: The Federated CMS Architecture     91

Chapter 5: CMS Deployment Strategy     133

Chapter 6: Integration—There’s No Way Around It!     177

Chapter 7: The Future of the CMS     197

Chapter 8: Continual Improvement for the CMS     241

Chapter 9: Leveraging the CMS     265

Chapter 10: Enjoy the Fruits of Success     297

 

Glossary     313

About the Author

Glenn O’Donnell is a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research, a top technology industry research and advisory firm. He is a trusted adviser to IT organizations worldwide, serving Infrastructure and Operations professionals. He is the Forrester analyst covering CMDB, configuration and change management, and IT automation and is a major contributor to Forrester’s growing ITIL and ITSM coverage. He was previously a Principal Product Marketing Manager with EMC’s Resource Management Software Group, responsible for marketing and strategy development for the EMC application-oriented software offerings and EMC’s overall IT service management strategy. Prior to EMC, he was a Program Director at META Group, also as a top IT Operations analyst. A prolific speaker and author, Mr. O’Donnell is a world-renowned authority on management systems, IT Service Management, IT Operations, and automation technologies and holds an ITIL certification. Since 1980, he has proven to be an innovator and thought leader in various technology development, operations, and architecture roles at Western Electric, Bell Labs,AT&T, and Lucent Technologies.

 

Carlos Casanova is the President and Founder of K2 Solutions Group, Inc. K2 Solutions Group, Inc., offers professional services, training, and technology products that support the delivery of CMDB/CMS, and ITIL initiatives. Prior to this, he was a Sr. Enterprise Architect with MetLife, Inc., where he was the visionary and manager for the first CMDB deployment and subsequently helped design its second-generation, enterprise-wide ITSM platform. He has been a speaker at major ITIL conferences on Configuration Management and CMDB, has several ITIL certifications, and is well known and respected by ITIL leaders. Mr. Casanova’s career spans electronic hardware design, military contracting, software architecture, management consulting, business process modeling, account management, entrepreneurial startups, and technology architectures. In addition, his professional experience in IT Risk Management, Business Continuity, and IT Security has provided him with a broad foundation and perspective that enables him to maintain a constant client/end-user focus with integrity and objective reasoning at the core of all his designs.

 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137008376
• ISBN-13: 978-0137008377
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #440,123 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Strategy, May 8, 2009

By	Mark A. Lucas "SingleSpeeder" (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have had this book since early March 2009 and am not complete with it yet...but... what I have read is great. If you are looking for deep technical guidance on setting up a CMDB, buy another book on VSS, Serena, ClearCase, Subversion or whatever you plan on using.

However, ODonnell/Casanova's book covers configuration management at an enterprise and strategic level and how critical CM and a CMS is to support development methodolgies and support methodologies (al la.. ITIL/ITSM). It also stretches the common concept that a CMDB is for code version control and management, ODonnell/Casanova suggest that a HR system contains a partition of the CMDB for those configuration items we refer to as "employees" (perm and contract and outsourced...), and that other systems are also forms of CMDBs because they manage other assets of an enterprise that have potential to be changed in status, location, cost, or relationships.

There ARE some basic architecture guidelines in the book that cover various federation schemes and other considerations - these will be useful for a CM Manager, Chief Data Officer, VP of Data, or architect supporting the development, testing, and code & document management environments.

Again, this is a book very useful for IT management to develop their strategy for implementing a CMS or enterprise CMDB, esp for organizations with distributed locations, esp. mutli-nationals or those relying on offshore development or support.

Overall a very good book...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book with clear guidance, September 24, 2009

By	Timothy Raducha-Grace - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book helps to address a clear need for many organizations -- improved knowledge of IT assets and how they relate to IT services. One study showed that almost 66% of CFOs and CIOs do not know the size of their core IT assets, much less all of their IT assets or the services they support. Without improving this knowledge, it is very difficult to improve service levels, maximize the ROI from these assets, or optimize the IT landscape.

This book fills a critical need for many organizations -- how to translate the guidance under ITSM best practices such as ITIL and make ITSM practices a reality. For organizations that already started down the CMDB path of ITIL V2, this book can help take the next step to develop an effective CMS under V3. For organizations just getting started, it can help you start down the path.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the need for CMDB, March 28, 2009

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Have you, the IT manager, ever wondered what exactly you manage? Not so much the people, but the hardware and software. The book explains that you need a Configuration Management Database, and what it does or should do. At the simplest level of implementation, it is a database of an inventory of hardware. Nowadays, this usually means machines on a network. Here, things are pretty mature. There are software packages called network monitors that use Simple Network Management Protocol to query every object on the network supporting the protocol. From this automated discovery, you can easily get a list of active network devices and some information about each.

But the book shows how a CMDB is much more. Given the hardware, what software is installed or, and this is often more pertinent, what is currently running? To some limited extent, a standard network monitor can poll the various ports on each machine and make an inventory of which are active, along with a guess as to what is listening of those ports. But the guess only works with commonly used ports. In general, a CMDB has application discovery tools that you need to give access to the servers. Here the problem is much harder than for network devices, because there is no analog of SNMP for a general application to conform to. So the discovery tool might scan the server's disk to see what is installed, and to look up the process table for what is active.

All this is for automated discovery. As the book points out, this is far easier and more robust than manual discovery.

The book also touches upon the increasing use of SOA applications. The interrelated nature of these is another level of complexity beyond what more discovery tools currently handle. Yet if SOA really takes off, you need an awareness of the interdependencies between your SOA applications.

An ongoing process of CMDB improvement. The book makes you aware of the need for CMDB as well as its current limitations.