THE ITSM SERIES

1. Incident Management
2. Problem Management
3. Change Management
4. Release Management
5. Service Level Management
6. Service Request Fulfilment
7. …

When reading ITILversion 2 you could clearly see software distribution stamped across the whole release management process. Version 3 release management aims to be more than that. Its purpose seems to have grown to be the transition motor. But in my opinion, the release management process is still a mixture of sound project management (ITIL v3 is extremely ignorant on project management interfaces), the software release cycle and deployment and some management of change (not change management). If you thumb through the ITIL v3 documentation you will not find a precise goal of release (and deployment) management.

The ISO 20000 specification contains a short summary of the objective of release management:

Objective: To deliver, distribute and track one or more changes in a release into the live environment.

The emphasis is added by me. The version with the phrase “in a release” comes from the part 1 of the specification, while part 2 (the code of practice) contains the objective without the word release.

A while ago I had some high hopes on the then still forthcoming ITIL v3 release management. They were not fulfilled as I would have like it to be. So I will try to define what I would like to see in release management.

Goal of Release Management

Release management coordinates and verifies the introduction of new or updated items into the live IT environment. It controls the roll-out of these items starting from build and/or acquisition to hand over to production.

Proper release management controls the variety of items used in your IT environment.

Just a classical Blog post explaining why it was quiet the last 2 weeks. I was on holiday with a camper (brit.) / motorhome (amer.) / travel van (austr.) and I visited Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France.

This was our first time going camping like this and we had a great time. As soon as I covered my backlog I will be posting some more.

Tool Compliance Discussion

1. Official “ITIL Tool” endorsement by the OGC
2. Bullshit Alarm: BMC awarded “ITIL(r) Process Compliant” certification
3. Even worse: CobiT Tool Compliancy
4. Will the SW Assessment Scheme ever be open?

I just had another look at SMCGs Site and found a new page with a little more information on the assessment scheme. One part is a small Q&A, which contains the following section:

Do I get to see the questions beforehand?

No. The questions will remain with the Licensed Assessor and only be asked at the time of the assessment. The Vendor should treat the tool assessment element as if they were demonstrating to a prospective client how they adhere to ITIL. This is to ensure a level playing field where some vendors have more time or resources to prepare a demonstration to pre-released questions. Therefore the demonstrator needs to be very fluent in both ITIL, the application and their documentation.

To me this looks like (could anyone confirm or deny this?) the questions will not be open to the public. If this is true, a buyer will not know why this piece of software advertised by the OGC and what the benefit of the rubber stamp is.

Great standard!

Tool Compliance Discussion

1. Official “ITIL Tool” endorsement by the OGC
2. Bullshit Alarm: BMC awarded “ITIL(r) Process Compliant” certification
3. Even worse: CobiT Tool Compliancy
4. Will the SW Assessment Scheme ever be open?

Ken Turbitt commented on my post Bullshit Alarm: BMC awarded ITIL(r) Process Compliant certification. I will quote one section here:

This week I spoke at two conferences of ITSM community who loved the idea, even a University wanted to find out more. With some COBIT followers asking if I can set up a similar scheme for that too – watch this space in the years to come…..

This will provide an even less usefull certification for tools. Maybe the select COBIT followers can explain what their goal is on this? Someone please warn ISACA.

Tool Compliance Discussion

1. Official “ITIL Tool” endorsement by the OGC
2. Bullshit Alarm: BMC awarded “ITIL(r) Process Compliant” certification
3. Even worse: CobiT Tool Compliancy
4. Will the SW Assessment Scheme ever be open?

As I pointed out in http://buzina.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/official-itil-tool-endorsement-by-the-ogc/, I am not a fan of the official tool certification process, but it has become a reality. As suspected before, the first company to “pilot” this certification is BMC, as the new certification scheme was brought forward by Ken Turbitt (ex-BMC), who incidentally also is the CEO of SMCG, the first licensed software assessor.

No other company has had the chance to apply for it yet, the documentation on the scheme is not available (find the schedule here http://www.itil-officialsite.com/News/ITILSoftwareSchemeOperationalPilotLaunch.asp) and obviously all has been achieved in a close “buddy-style”.

Other vendors from large to small were invited to join in the Pilot, only BMC got the paperwork done in time, other vendors are still working on their paperwork, but will join the scheme.

So only BMC finished their certification within 4 days of the official announcement. The documentation is not available to the public and there has been no involvement of the IT service management community.

Please let the voice of the IT service management community cry out saying: “The scheme is bullshit, payed for by the software vendors to make them look good”. It has nothing to do with sound service management. Do not listen to any vendor telling you anything about their applicability to any kind of process (or potentially other) standard. Remember that IT service management is a framework to manage people and software is not good at that.

Even those who believe in such SW certification schemes should be able to rally behind this statement due to the complete lack of transperency, the missing documentation and the doggy dodgy style of this creation.

BMC Press Release

Edited based on Kens feedback below.

In my post on CMDB autodiscovery and other fairy talesthe ITSkeptic raised the question of: “when does any old bag of configuration management data becomes a CMDB”.

In his opinion a CMDB should show all CIs under change control and their relationships to the service. This seems to be a fairly complex and according to the skeptic unachievable and undesirable (on account of being far to expensive).

So what if we take this completeness requirement out of the CMDB? Everybody knows that a CMDB (CMS or whatever) can never be fully accurate and complete, so we have to make sure that the usage of the data is fault tolerant. ITPedant (Robs own suggestion ) argues that this can not be called a CMDB.

In my opinion, a CMDB is an Information System. It helps with decision taking, but it does not take decisions. So it aids the impact analysis, but it does not automate it. It can not do this. The vendors are selling their systems with this story. That could work, if you had to reduce your failed changes rate from 20% down (refer to the study “The Total Economic Impact(TM) of the BMC Atrium CMDB” by Forrester), then a system with approx. 90% data accuracy could improve your situation (sometimes, maybe and if you are lucky. At least on an ROI calculation paper). But in a real world, where we have smaller targets to hit, people with knowledge and a valid (fault tolerant) process help you more in getting the failure rate down.

So why do we need a CMDB? I do not need this term. I need a configuration management process, that is in control of the relevant and usefull data. I need it to publish this data to other processes and organisations, so that they have a good foundation for their decisions. Why does everybody talk about the CMDB? Not many people (anymore) are talking about the trouble ticketing system when they really mean the incident management process.

So if a CMDB may only be the idealized version containing the whole nothing but the whole of the IT services, components, systems and objects and their reletionships, then yes nobody has a CMDB and nobody ever will. So let’s continue to use CMDB for the unrealistic all-in-one-for-all-purposes (German “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau” direct translation “Egglaying Wool-Milk-Pig”) and try finding a name for the achievable environment in which we keep the configuration data.

My ideas:

• As per Title CMDC – Configuration Management Data Container
• As ITIL states CMS (but people believe this to be even more than a CMDB, while I am looking for a term that is a little less than a full CMDB)
• ITEIS – IT Environment Information System

Go ahead post ideas in the comments.

As I promised in an earlier post, here is the slide deck of my noventum day presentation

CMDB autodiscovery and other fairy tales

I hope you enjoy seeing it, even if it lacks the voice stream.

Today we held our second noventum day event in the great city of Istanbul. It was a great success, having more than 40 top ranking managers from large Turkish companies attending a whole day of interesting presentations.

I presented CMDB autodiscovery and other fairy tales. Other topics included excelling IT budgeting procedures and achieveing cost transperency from Volkan Bey (Mercedes-Benz Turkey) and an entertaining report from Finansbank (Ahmet Bey and Ayhan Bey) titled ITSM implementation and organizational effect.

Overall a very interesting exchange on IT Management and the organizational and cultural effects. I will soon post the english version of the slides.

Tool Compliance Discussion

1. Official “ITIL Tool” endorsement by the OGC
2. Bullshit Alarm: BMC awarded “ITIL(r) Process Compliant” certification
3. Even worse: CobiT Tool Compliancy
4. Will the SW Assessment Scheme ever be open?

Ken Turbitt drops the bomb that some have been hearing for a while. The OGC will define a tool verification scheme for ITIL. Different companies may apply for a license to perform the assessments, Service Management Consultancy Group (SMCG) Ltd will be the first, while our big friend the APM Group will audit these licensees. There has been no open discussion within the IT service management community about this and there will not be any of it, since:

A pilot has already been completed with a major Vendor and we simply await the OGC’s last action.

So what are the impacts to the IT service management community? How about these:

• The vendor grip on ITIL will increase
  We all agreed that IT service management is not a tool issue. I do not mind vendors to form a group for standardization in technical areas, but why should the software development business dominate an area they know nothing (at least not much) about?
• The competition will be reduced
  It will be more expensive for new vendors to enter the market, thus reducing the competitive pressure on the existing large players. A vendor lock will not bring benefits to the IT service management tool market.
• The assessment criteria will allow any vendor to endorsed
  The assessment company (companies if additional assessors will join) will be interested in positive assessments. The vendors will be interested in positive assessments. APMG will be interested in many assessors, which will only survive if they positively assess many vendors and no one from the IT service management community will influence the assessment scheme. This means there is no real benefit in the endorsement scheme.
• Top management will ignore ITIL even more
  Since there is an officially endorsed standard for ITIL tools, top management will regard this issue as solved. They will force the organization to buy only endorsed applications and believe all to be perfect. Selling useful IT service management consultancy will be more difficult (my profession) and ITIL will be reduced in importance.

So what do you all think, is this another nail in the coffin for ITIL? Shall we all gather around the next promising framework (maybe CobiT & ValIT)?

Edit: Thanks to the itskeptic ITIL Software Endorsement Scheme dropped unsuspected for his post.

After reading a little bit more on amazons EC2 offer, I must say they need to be made famous for their advances in standardization. All their servers are built from templates, so they thrive on standardization. There is no way to save data to local storage, which helps you:

1. Keep all servers started from the same template really the same.
2. Restore after a rouge program (or a rogue sys-admin or developer) has corrupted the environment.
3. Deploy as many servers of the same template as quickly as possible.
4. Update your template to update the running machines. Great way of deployment.

Thanks for dev2ops for the enlightment. We now can start to think about how we can employ these techniques that the cloud is creating for us. As I pointed out here I doubt that many companies will save money from cloud computing, since they will try to save brains with it. The smart companys will invest brains and learn a lot about standardization, automization and operations and save money on the inhouse data center as well as use cloud services where applicable.