While it may seem troublesome that I actually thought about work while on vacation, it really wasn't work...more of a carry over from some blogging I did before leaving. It got me thinking about ITSM On-Ramp's approach and in particular a recent Webinar I did for eG Innovations.
The post I'm referring to was about a vendor who announced a software product that leveraged that fully hyped ITIL term, the CMDB, in relation to new 'Web 2.0' and 'Wiki' like capabilities.
Of course when you title the post MyCMDB? What are they smokin' over at Managed Objects? it makes for some serious flaming and it did not disappoint. However I could not seem to stop thinking about this particular dialog...
Having just read The Cult of the Amateur, I could see both where the IT Skeptic and the vendor were coming from. On the one hand, the vendor clearly wanted to leverage the market awareness of CMDB and promote what may be some interesting features of their product. On the other hand, the use of the term CMDB along with terms like 'Wiki' seemed to be at odds. After all, do you consider Wikipedia a single source of truth?
As luck would have it, I was just ready to get rid of this nagging thread in my head when I read Dilbert in the Sunday paper (see 7/13/08 strip in the new Dilbert Wiki in my blog's sidebar).
The basis of ITIL's CMDB is a single, validated and audited, source of truth about the service infrastructure; particularly the relations between Configuration Items in the context of a service.
Don't get me wrong, I am a believer in the Web 2.0 world; but we can't simply 'collaborate' our way out of what is increasingly an n-tier, virtualized mess. The CMDB must form the basis of what we KNOW, and without real time service impact management (i.e., service monitoring intelligence) then it may be difficult to know when additional rigor is needed to ensure what you think you know is actually correct.
We often KNOW when it's broken (the user tells us). We don't always know WHY.
So by all means, go ahead and collaborate, but make sure your collaboration is based on accurate information. Basing your knowledge base purely on the knowledge of experts, without challenge or validation, may not lead to wisdom...and I'm not sure it really leads to rapid isolation either.
Continuous improvement is a painful, savage journey, precisely because is challenges us to change. Challenging the status quo, such as the need to hang onto silo based processes and silo based monitoring, is essential to real and lasting change.
It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
- Epictetus
While a base of knowledge supported by a foundation of truth is a worthy objective, diagnosis in today's complex service infrastructures needs more than a room full of experts performing manual triage.
Relying on the Cult of the Amateur may not be the best way to keep the lights on. Call it what you want --- Service Analytics, root-cause, automated triage, service monitoring intelligence, etc. --- will remain an important element of survival.
Having anything less is no laughing matter.