An excerpt of the interview is below.

In their book The CMDB Imperative: How to Realize the Dream and Avoid the Nightmares, configuration management database (CMDB) consultant Glenn O'Donnell and implementer Carlos Casanova demystify CMDB implementations and discuss how to exploit the benefits of CMDB tools.

After several discussions about the maturity of configuration management databases, the lack of maturity among products to support them, and the growing misconceptions of what these tools were, O'Donnell and Casanova produced the first CMDB pragmatic guide to CMDBs. You can download Chapter 2 of The CMDB Imperative, "What is a CMDB?," for free.

What is the relationship between CMDBs and configuration management systems (CMSs)?
Glenn O'Donnell: The CMDB implies it is a single database instance. D and B are half of the term. Of course, this is precisely how most IT professionals attempted to build their CMDBs, and most either failed or fell short of expectations.
In reality, the information resides in many places and in many forms. The CMS accounts for this distribution of the data, and it treats the collection of sources as a virtual repository of the truth. The IT Infrastructure Library, version 3 (ITIL v3) did a great job of highlighting this distributed nature of the information. It does not, however, offer much detail about how these distributed sources are linked. For this, another notable development was the CMDB Federation standard (CMDBf). The two are perfectly complementary.
We explain in detail how distributed data sources are assembled into more useful abstractions that incorporate data from each relevant source. We use ITIL v3 and the CMDBf term management data repository, or MDR, to describe these sources. Abstractions can be further assembled into even more abstractions to represent higher-level applications, services, business processes and so on. We cement these concepts so they can be applied to real-world situations.
Indeed the CMDB is now replaced by the CMS, which is a far more useful and realistic model for capturing, managing and leveraging the huge amount of information people need in a world of exploding complexity.
In the book, we walk through topics like why you need a CMS, how it fits in, ownership, what comes first, building service models and the various organizations that contribute or consume the CMS data in an effort to provide value to the customer. We urge the reader to interpret our words and apply them to their particular environment rather than just take them as a black-and-white recipe. Every environment is different and has different needs but the end goal is similar: to deliver value to business customers.

How does the book demystify CMDBs?
Carlos Casanova: Our main objective was to answer the same questions we had, like, "What is a CMDB?," "Why must the CMDB die and the CMS be born?," and "What do I need to account for years down the road?" This came naturally to us because of our experience in various roles throughout our careers. Had we both been only analysts or only practitioners, we would not have had the knowledge to challenge each other's ideas and visions. This pushed us to develop a stronger and more mature vision.
We made sure the book was practical, concise and forward-looking. We included in each chapter a short summary and FAQ section with some of questions we have encountered while making sure that each chapter was written with clarity about whether an idea was forward-looking or current. Understanding what is possible today versus two years from now is one of the main challenges practitioners encounter today.
All practitioners face marketing propaganda on how spectacular one product is and how it can solve all their problems. These marketing campaigns unfortunately only add confusion and unrealistic expectations. Last, we tried not to overcomplicate the explanations or dive too deep into the inner workings of ITIL because there are plenty of quality references available.

The full interview is available for download in our registered user area of the site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Erin Kelly is an editorial assistant at TechTarget. Erin is a Northeastern coop student who will be working at the company until the end of June. She supports the Data Center and Virtualization and Security media groups through a variety of editorial duties. Erin studies journalism and writes for the Huntington News, an independent print and online paper produced by Northeastern students. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

• • 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 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”

Glenn O’Donnell is a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research, a distinguished technology industry research and advisory firm. A trusted advisor to IT organizations worldwide, he is a highly experienced authority on management software, IT Service Management, IT Operations, and IT automation technologies.

Carlos Casanova is the President of K2 Solutions Group, Inc., an ITIL and ITSM solutions firm, and was previously a Senior Enterprise Architect with MetLife, Inc. He has spoken at major ITIL conferences on Configuration Management and CMDB, successfully implemented a CMDB at a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and is well known and respected by ITIL leaders.

An excerpt of the article is below.

Convergence is roughly defined as the act of moving towards some form of commonality or an authoritative end. Whether in actuality or perception we see examples of it everywhere we look. Everyday, IT professionals are asked to “do more with less” and you can only do that by increasing your process and technology efficiencies and the proposed solutions are plentiful. ITIL^®, IT Service Management, Six Sigma, CMMI^®, PRINCE2^®, SaaS, SOA are all mechanisms that offer aspects of a possible solution to our efforts to become more effective and efficient. But are these the sole answers or is there something in addition to them that needs to exist?

Configuration Management System (CMS) solutions will require a significant amount of convergence around the CMS model if any effectiveness and efficiency gains are to be realized. As an enabling process and technology solution, it is vital that the CMS model becomes the target meta structure for IT data in your environment. It must become the de facto language essentially that all of your other systems understand. This will enable operating cost reduction initiatives such as data source elimination and data storage reduction. It also enables your IT department to move towards a services driven model which provides insight into the true operating cost of delivering a business service.

An important thing to remember is that a successful CMS implementation requires both a technology and a process component. You can not succeed if you only have one. It is imperative that you implement the necessary governance and compliance process lifecycle components of the ITIL framework in order to ensure the legitimacy of your CMS. If your CMS data is not viewed as reliable, comprehensive and actionable, it will be ignored and the CMS will become just another database amongst the others already in your environment. The contents of your CMS must be viewed as information not just more unrelated data. A way of doing this is by using federation rather than integration.

The full article is available for download in our registered user area of the site.

An excerpt of the article is below.

How to Prepare for a Budget Crisis:
Financial Life Support For Your ITSM Program
By: Carlos Casanova – President,  K2 Solutions Group, Inc.

Executives across all industries are demanding that their leadership teams reduce costs whatever way they can so as to help the organization survive these challenging economic times. Budgets have begun to disappear for even the most widely supported initiatives in an organization. For many of you, this includes your multi-year ITSM initiatives. Very few projects are immune from the cost cutting efforts that most companies have ventured on so do not sit back thinking that your ITSM initiative will not be affected.

You need to be proactive. Go to your senior management with options on how you can help them reduce costs in 2009.  If you don’t, they will likely make those decisions for you and you can be relatively certain that long-term strategic programs will be the targets to be put on hold until the economy improves or canceled outright. So do your part to save your long-term ITSM initiative by smartly offering to redirect part of your long-term strategic investment towards more short-term gains.
The full article is available for download in our registered user area of the site.

Synopsis: The presentaion used a case study approach to demonstrate what is driving senior business leaders in this economy. It helps demonstrate how Service Management professionals need to leverage those drivers to deliver their Service Management intiatives.
This presentation is available for download in our registered user area of the site.

Synopsis: Implementing Configuration Management is so much more than rolling out a new technology. It involves cultural, political, procedural and territorial changes – not to mention managing the complexity of existing data sources that need integrating into the Configuration Management process.

This fact-fueled session focuses on the exciting Configuration Management journey undertaken by MetLife, a large financial services organization. Carlos will describe his organization’s approach and tactics as well as how ‘Gold’ solved the dilemma of multitude of data sources. As an added bonus, he’ll talk about how decisions made several years prior to adopting ITIL impacted the implementation of the Configuration Management program.
This presentation is not available for download. You may discuss the topic directly with us by contacting us directly via email or by phone.

Synopsis: Several tools exist that can generate large volumes of data about CI's, however, since a large component of Configuration Management is about Verification & Audit of CI data, it is necessary to determine what the discovered data will be compared against to determine how accurate it really is.

Discovered data should be used to verify manually generated and maintained data where it exists and as the authoritative source where it doesn't. How discovered data is used must be clearly communicated to its consumers so that they are fully aware of whether the data was verified in any way by control processes.

As discovered data becomes more reliable, an organization may choose to move more towards discovered data only, but this must be done very carefully until every detail of how the data is discovered is understood as well as what nuances each discovery tool brings.
This presentation is not available for download. You may discuss the topic directly with us by contacting us directly via email or by phone.