Strategic Planning Assumption: In three years, 75 percent of all CMDB implementations will fail
to achieve a comprehensive services view of all consolidated IT domains (0.8 probability).
Do All Roads Lead to CMDB?
Ronni Colville
Gartner 25th Annual Data Center Conference, Las Vegas, NV 2006
Interesting presentation and article. Here are just a few quotes as to why this will be the case.
1 Proprietary API's will prevent all the tools from working together well. Quote: "No vendor has
proven their CMDB technology capable of federating the multitude of configuration data sources that any given enterprise might have." Which I believe is true. There are really important specialized data silos such as procurement, the service catalog, source configuration management that need to remain independent. Because...
2 The CMDB can't scale to meet the real time data requirements of many applications and will have at best 25% to 3% of the data. This means that islands of configuration data will need to exist.
Quote "Gartner believes the value of the CMDB is to maintain a services view; therefore only the data necessary to understand the relationships between and amongst the component that represents the service should be "in" the CMDB." Which makes eminent sense. In fact, Gartner believes the CMDB will be much more valuable as an analytical tool, like a datamart or datawarehouse, than a real time repository of all data in IT.
3 Performance is a real issue if we tie events, incidents, problems. Quote: "Storing all data in a CMDB would be extremely difficult and complex to maintain and would likely never
represent a "real time" view. More importantly, no data store would be able to scale to maintain that level of depth." Or transaction support, or specific data models. Tidbit: most implementations of CMDB's are in data centers, not the service desk.
This is why I believe that the service catalog needs to addressed up front. By focusing on what customers need and want, building your catalog first ensures that you focus on the services that have most impact and the attributes of the service with the most value to your customers. It also buys you political goodwill to engage on your multi-year CMDB project while reducing the potential work.
To read the whole presentation, you need to be a Gartner client, or buy the document at their site. Gartner.com.
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