When we started this blog, CMDBs were all the rage. ITIL was at its peak. Practically every single customer asked us about our “CMDB strategy”.
From the start we had the vision that passing event, performance, and business context data through the already overloaded CMDB was a terrible mistake.
First, it was not a “best practice” as opposed to the rest of ITIL initiatives. Back then the number of existing companies around the world that had finished such a CMDB was zero. And it remains zero.
Service Management guru Ian Clayton posted a great paper from one of his customers, about why Outside-In thinking is paramount to avoid frustrating everybody and yourself, as the article wisely says:
“For most organizations, it is a natural tendency to look inward at what they do. They are focused (sometimes totally) on how the work is designed and accomplished, and performance measures are geared toward achieving internal goals. (…)
Failure to please the customer leads to, well, failure.”
The article is short, download it from http://www.servicemanagement101.com/files/lockheed-lean-for-services-white-paper.pdf and while you are at it, subscribe to Ian Clayton’s blog.
The Visibility Blog by Raul Cristian Aguirre 