I want to let you know that I finished designing a blog site for my corporate website and I hope to be posting there more regularly.  The new blog is call “The Ascent” (http://blog.k2sg.com)” which is based on the corporate tag line of “Leading the ascent to the peak of Service Management”. I imported all of the posts from this blog into the new one in the event that you choose to only follow the new one.

In one of my Twitter exchanges, someone asked for a list of Open Source ITSM solutions. What I had available was a list I gathered over the years that targeted CMDB versus general ITSM.

I can’t speak to how good/bad these sites are since I gathered most of these over the years when doing my initial research starting back in 2004/05. I checked to confirm they are still all live but not whether they are up-to-date with recent advancements or if they’ve gone off the deep end into skepticism or flying high in the sky over the lands of ITILtopia.

Read them yourself and make your own judgments.
CMDB Info.com
http://www.cmdb.info/p/index.html

Zenoss
http://www.zenoss.com/product/network-management

ProcessWorx CMDB ( I believe they were Open Source but this would need to be confirmed )
http://www.processworx.com/products/ITSM/cmdb.htm

ONE CMDB
http://www.onecmdb.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

CMDBuild.org ( Spanish Language site )
http://www.cmdbuild.org/

easyCMDB
http://www.easycmdb.com/

You can follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/CarlosCasanova

Also, please visit the K2 Solutions Group Inc. website at http://www.k2sg.com for other related articles and presentations available for free download.

ITIL V3, although on the surface to some may appear to be more complex than ITIL V2, is in fact a clarification of ITIL V2 much more so than it is an upgrade. Many of the components detailed in the ITIL V3 literature are merely elements that were left out of the V2 literature forcing every individual and organization to fend for themselves in trying to define what it all meant and how they were going to glue it all together.  In ITIL V3 however, they have made a valiant effort to at least identify these areas and document some best practice around them. I am not stating that everything in the ITIL V3 literature be viewed as gospel by any means but it is at least is a step in the right direction to identify the gaps and put some structure around them.
This lead us to the discussion on whether or not a CMDB can be built. I would agree that a “CMDB” is very hard and possibly impossible to build ‘IF’ and ONLY ‘IF’ your view of it is a single monolithic repository as prescribed by the black & white written words of the ITILV2 literature. If however, you fully digested the purpose of what the CMDB was intended for and what problems you were trying to resolve by implementing it, I totally disagree that it can not be done. The concept of a CMDB can be deployed but it must be in the form of a federated CMS if you stand any chance to succeed.

The  key to success is in the simplicity of purpose. Like every other complex entity, the CMS is just made up of smaller components that can be addressed somewhat independently but under an over-arching umbrella.  If tackled on that level, the CMS can become a reality to most organizations. I’m not implying that it will be done overnight and won’t come without challenges, challenges which will typically be on the cultural side rather than process or technology end.  A key element to this success of course is still a true adoption of the purpose of ITIL and not simply a belief that it is something “you implement”. If your organization and/or leadership believes it is a project to implement rather than a philosophy to adopt, you will very likely not succeed regardless of whether you head down the ITIL V2 or V3 path.

ITIL is much more of a cultural transformation rather than a process or technology implementation and until everyone accepts that, there will continue to be many failed attempts to implement ITIL, regardless of which version is being attempted.

About the Blogger

Carlos Casanova is the founder of K2 Solutions Group, Inc. and co-author of “The CMDB Imperative”. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CarlosCasanova

An article I wrote for Information Management magazine was just posted.  Check it out and please leave comments on Digg.

Click here to read the posting on Information Magazine website

Click here to read the article on the Digg website where you can leave comments

Thanks,
Carlos

You may not be aware of this but a sample chapter of the book is posted on the InformIT.com website.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1329141

I hope you enjoy it.

Carlos

I am working with some of the thought leaders at OMG to help design and promote a Green Business Maturity Model (GBMM) so that the IT community can deliver a solution that is being sought after by the federal government and many other publicly traded organizations.  It didn’t take long for me to see that there was tremendous opportunity to leverage the same concepts of a CMS/CMDB design to address an implementation of GBMM.  Once the GBMM is defined, the implementation effort comes down to the aggregation and federation of data from disparate sources very much like those demanded by an IT Service Management implementation. We are hopeful that we will be able to leverage the principles of a CMS structure to address the sustainability needs of the IT industry at large.

Stay tuned and please contact me if you are interested in working with me on my effort of creating a Sustainable Service Management Model based on GBMM.

This is just a quick post to keep things fresh. First off, the book is finally available for purchase at your favorite book seller.

It has been a busy few weeks for Glenn and I talking with people about the book as well as doing presentations and interviews.  Glenn has been traveling around the country as well as internationally talking with his clients and we have received tremendous positive feedback so far on the book.

We jointly delviered the key note address at the annual Lehigh-Delaware Valley itSMF LIG conference and again got very positive feedback from everyone in attendance. We are very excited about the feedback so far and look forward to working directly with many of you on ITSM and CMS/CMDB solutions.  If you are interested in seeing the presentation that we delivered at the LDV LIG conference, you can download it from the book’s website www.cmdbimperative.com .

I’m currently preparing for my next presentation which will be at the OMG’s Technical meeting in Washington DC on March 23rd. I will be leading a roundtable discussion on sustainability with regards to Business Operations as part of the “Green Computing Information Day” (http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/agendas/dc-09/gcio-agenda.htm).  I truly beleive that we can leverage the work already laid out by the DMTF’s CMDBf specification and the work currently being done by the GCIO around the GBMM to put in place a CMS that not only supports ITSM as we traditionally have seen it but also supports the requirements that a sustainability model would need.

The two things that happened were first, I noticed a book that has been on my night stand for over 4 months which is called The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. I really had no desire to read anything while working on the book to be honest so it sat there until now. The second was an episode on The Science Channel I watched last night called “Connected: The Power of Six Degrees”. Yes I know, what else would you expect from someone who has an Electrical Engineering degree to be watching but this station.

Both of these things reminded me that regardless of our professional or personal aspirations, we are all seeking to simplify our lives and make sense of the confusion. Interestingly enough, we reference this topic in the summary of  Chapter 9 when we quoted the founder of Kayanta. “We’re inspired by the plethora of opportunities offered through the Internet but bewildered by the amount of personal effort required to extract even the modest benefit” ( Click here to read full text )

Please let us know what you think about, The CMDB Imperative: How to realize the dream and avoid the nightmares and if you find the topic interesting enough, you can purchase the book on Amazon.om by clicking here.