Jean-Christophe Martin's blog - itil tag

Compuware acquire Proxima Technology

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:45:19 GMT

Compuware announced yesterday that it has acquired Proxima Technology.

Proxima is the maker of Proxima Centauri, a Service Level Management tool with interesting capabilities, specially in the way they aggregate key performance indicators into business service metrics.

Proxima has also a unique way to combine Six Sigma methodology and ITIL, to, for example, normalize the events generated by the monitoring of KPIs into Defects Per Millions of Opportunities, rolling them up into service metrics as Sigma numbers.

I don't know how Compuware is going to use this technology, but one issue with the Proxima approach is that the service impact relationships, defining how IT components are contributing to a service, is defined within Centauri, using rules instead of model relationships .

Without a tight integration with a CMDB, SLM/BSM tools are required to duplicate the CMDB items and relationships, sometimes using two different models, providing a weak synchronization.
As a comparison, BMC Service Impact Manager is using the BMC Atrium CMDB as the model repository, adding service impact relationships on top of the exiting items, making sure that there is a tight synchronization between assets and business services. And since Compuware does not have a real CMDB, or a discovery solution (they use the Collation/IBM solution), it's unlikely that they will be able to provide this level of integration.

Technorati Tags: BSM, Business Service Management, ITIL, M&A, SLM

OneCMDB : Open Source CMDB

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:28:23 GMT

In September 2006 Lokomo Systems announced the release of an open source CMDB called OneCMDB.
This is a very good start, but I would point to several issues, at first glance:

The model used seems to be developed in house, without any link to DMTF CIM : Why re-invent a model which already exists elsewhere ?
The reconciliation of discovered data with existing data seems not existent.
The security model seems inexistent (or I did not find it): no role based access.

I don't want to be too harsh, but one thing I discovered when I joined BMC is that a CMDB is more than just a persistence store for an object model. It's actually very complex, specifically the reconciliation and federation of various information sources. The CMDB is a virtually centralized repository for information residing in many, many different locations.
Another key ITIL recommendation for the CMDB, is that all modifications of the CMDB should be performed under change management control. Therefore, configuration management and change management are really tied at the hip.

I'll try to play with this open source CMDB and explain in a bit more details the need for reconciliation, and integration with change management in some upcoming posts.

Anyway, thanks to Lokomo for releasing their sources under GPL.

Technorati Tags: CMDB, opensource

ITIL Foundation Certification & Airport Simulation

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 02:13:23 GMT

Today, I received the results from my ITIL foundation Certification test. Some questions were really tricky, but I passed.
I was going to just go to the test, but BMC Business School has an ITIL foundation training which includes the EXIN exam at the end.
I must say that I was surprised by the quality of the class, specifically the airport simulation. Within the 3 days class, there is one day dedicated to a simulation game applying "experiential learning" techniques:

In the simulation the airport has grown rapidly requiring the addition of numerous business services. With an increasingly complex IT infrastructure, a “Service Desk” has been introduced to support the business, along with a “Technical Specialist” team to maintain the infrastructure and resolve any issues that may arise. A supplier function is also included to provide additional infrastructure and consultancy. All students play a role in this, whether in the business or in the IT team ensuring SLA’s with the business are met.

Really not a boring way to learn ITIL (I'm sure that you CAN find really boring ITIL classes, this is definitely not one). If you are interested by the class, here is the link in the catalog. and you can even watch a video of the simulation.

Technorati Tags: ITIL