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What's the Future of Corporate IT and ITSM? (Video)
Our headline is the title of a survey SysAid did at Fusion, a "gathering of seasoned IT directors, service management implementers, and business analysts" that took place in early November. As Sysaid's marketing VP, Sophie Danby was the person who designed and implemented the survey, which consisted of only three questions: 1) Where do you see the corporate IT department in five years’ time? 2) With the consumerization of IT continuing to drive employee expectations of corporate IT, how will this potentially disrupt the way companies deliver IT? 3) What IT process or activity is the most important in creating superior user experiences to boost user/customer satisfaction? || You can obviously follow the first link above and see the survey's results. But in the video, Sophie adds some insights beyond the numerical survey results into near-future IT changes and what they mean for people currently working in the field.
They have this crazy idea that they can micro-manage every part of IT by using a single large process and a bunch of "services" that are internal.
So the main goal was to inventory the servers, the cards inside of them, their specs, which users use them, etc, into this big database called the "CMDB" or Configuration Management DataBase.
The CMDB is where they map these objects into a unit called a "CI" (configuration instance) and then eventually write fancy high level queries that return things that are "interesting".
A query may be for a single user account, which will then show all "assets" that user has used or needs. Dependencies can be drawn and queries can also just check for strange relationships. Like two servers that appear to be connected via a cross-over cable or a rogue MAC address (by scanning ARP tables and building CI's).
It actually sounds cool in practice but there is no usable CMDB in existance. HP has one that's very shiny but I can tell you it sucks and doesn't work. After asking and asking when I was at Ford if I could just freaking write one, I was told no. Then after a year and a half of downright failure, they switched from HP's crap to a different vendor and that later failed too.
It was instantly obvious that the discovery routines were seriously important, yet their frequency and limitations caused stale data. It was supposed to be a tool for us to discover things we didn't know about, but it just was an effort to bend the queries to look "real enough" when in reality any missing data (what you don't know) is what you're after.
Full of buzzwords and expensive software. I honestly think that just letting people be left alone at work on their computer is the best. Judge results, not time on facebook. Stop hiring people you don't trust which makes the trustworthy feel micromanaged. These tools won't help you learn anything you didn't already learn. The people who you force to install these discovery tools already know more than you will learn from the tools yet they are ignored while they scream the entire time you go through implementation.
In the end I left and got the hell out of doing any type of ITSM. Ford ruined me with their beaurcrazy and absolutely horrid management at the LL5/LL4 management levels. Pure idiots making high six figure salaries who take home 100K bonuses yet can't run a successful IT shop with virtually unlimited money and resources. I could have wrote a better tool in less than a year by myself without charging millions. NOPE. running to HP to get screwed which happened according to my predictions.