As CMDB experts go, I have a lot of experience, starting with implementations a decade ago when ITIL was almost unknown in North America. Still, a question posed to me at CA's recent customer-focused Development Buddy Summit sent me to the books -- the ITIL® books that is -- hunting for an answer...

Last week I spoke with a Hungarian banker about the CMDBf specification. He was broad and burley, with a thick beard, a muscular neck, shoulders like a bear, and a gruff, heavily accented voice. "CMDBf?" he sneered with a toss of his head. "I'll believe it when I see it." I was...

Of course I was delighted when CA CMDB r11.1 received a gold award in SearchDataCenter.com's Data Center Products of the Year 2007. I did think that the title of the award category, "CMDB and provisioning," was quite interesting, especially after just coming off of some itSMF USA planning...

To quote Yogi Berra, "it's déjà vu all over again." I could not shake that feeling after reading an article entitled " Providing a CMDBf Query and Registration Service " that appeared in the Eclipse Wiki on the COSMOS project page. Eclipse is an open source community and COSMOS...

I thought you might enjoy a glimpse of our farm in the snow. Forty years ago, my father raised calves in this small barn that my grandfather built around 1900. It was the first barn built on the farm. He later erected a much larger hay barn, but I don't have a picture I like as well as this one my...

I've been watching a battle between two opposing schools of thought in the CMDB world. One says that a CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the IT Service environment. Not the real configuration, not the way the system is working now, but the authorized configuration as determined by the...

If you've been following the progress of the CMDBf spec through my blog postings, you understand how proud and happy I am at the news that the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), the "the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management...

In an article in CIO entitled " Why IT Needs a Blueprint: The Case for a Unified Service Model ," my colleague, Helge Scheil, wrote the following: "A Unified Service Model provides insight into the service definition--that is, the assets, people and processes that support each service...

I recently spoke at a number of very well attended CMDB seminars. Without fail, I was asked the following question, either during my talk, or afterwards during the accompanying networking events: How can I implement a CMDB and show value quickly? I subscribe to a notion that my blogging colleague Marv...

At CA World last month, I participated in a round table with a group of CA partners - including Accenture, BearingPoint, and Cap Gemini-where we discussed significant problems in IT. We talked about how we, as software vendors and service providers, could help meet these problems by improving our products...