erp4it

Wiles and Vambenepe on CMDBf.

interesting perspectives on CMDBf from Van Wiles here. Key quote: "can you market these adapters without a common data model"? That is the rub, as I've been saying. However, one thing his post points out is that a market space for third party vendors is being opened up here. Metaintegration should take note, as CMDB interoperability will be a very similar challege to CASE tool interoperability.

More reinforcement from William Vambenepe here. Quotes:

Even if it works perfectly at the query level, it will just hasten the time when developers run into the real problem, model interoperability. CMDBf doesn’t help at all with this.... the real, hard, underlying problem is a problem of semantic integration.

Exactly.

And, I share his view that Semantic Web is probably the right road for enabling semantic integration.

-Charlie

Eclipse open-source CMDBf-based CMDB

here.

Services and applications

Like this post Just What is an ITIL Service Anyway? by IT Skeptic (Rob England): "An IT service is the availability and/or consumption of a type of transaction running on technology." Agree 100%. Where do transactions live? Inside applications. That means that applications may be IT services, a point of view I still hold to... and I still believe that too much of ITIL was written from a point of view that sees the application world as somehow different from the IT service world... a foreign land, too technical, and not really business-focused - when the exact opposite is true, the application is the service, and all those business analysts and developers are the essential solutions delivery core of the service lifecycle.

-ctb

ERP for IT - my views

Just to set the record straight for my friend the IT Skeptic:

Not sure I agree with "ERP for IT" either. Paid too many dues back in the day as an ERP architect for Accenture, where I saw the good and the bad of it. Here are some quotes from my book:

A new framework for IT management: portfolio lifecycles

Frameworks, frameworks, everywhere... ITIL, CMM, COBIT, etc., etc., ... and yet none of them satisfy. All have nagging gaps and flaws:

- ITIL's weakness with respect to production applications, the primary "service" offered by the modern IT organization...

- CMM's level of abstraction and disregard for operations...

- COBIT's narrow focus on governance and audit...

And all are process based. They focus on activities, not on things. And while activities are indeed important, I have to confess my data centricity. I've always leaned a bit more to nouns than verbs.

The concept of portfolio management is a better fit for me, and indeed ITIL calls for Service Portfolio Management, as an evolution of the original service catalog concept and co-optation of Application Portfolio Management.