ITIL: do people in the trenches care?
Alex Honor /
Seems like people that dedicate themselves to making tools that help scale up and improve precision of system configuration don’t find much value in ITIL and CMDB. A recent post on the Puppet blog,
The CMDB is a Consultant’s Myth gives a scathing commentary:
“I’ve long thought that the CMDB is just a bunch of crap. What is the (usually ‘the’, not ‘a’) CMDB? Well, it stands for ‘configuration management database’, but as far as I can tell the term is entirely meaningless.”
I think dev2ops folk would benefit from some formalized practices that help promote coordination. But so far, it hasn’t translated to practical tools nor profound adoption.
Sarbanes Oxley has been accused of being the “accounting firm and management consulting firm revenue protection act”. It helps nobody but the SOX “experts” pocketbooks.
Sadly ITIL has unfolded the same way. It’s a giant makework program for “enterprise architects”, consultants, and industry analysts. CMDB is just another ivory tower mandate that improves nothing but keeps the consulting fees flowing.
A bright side to ITIL/CMDB… it actually gets managers talking about the need for a centralized or model-driven configuration or management approach. There is some value in that.
Can’t agree with these comments. I am not a consultant, I am an in the trenches architect for a US Fortune 50 company. We need the CMDB because without it the continual re-surveying of the environment is killing us – the business case became crystal clear. There is a good availability business case as well in a more formal understanding of system interdependencies, required for both incident and change management.
Informed skepticism is one thing, but cynicism is another. There is merit in both ITIL and CMDB. See http://www.itskeptic.org for some good give and take on the subject.
-ctb