In case you haven't followed the ITIL v3 news, the concepts of a CMDB have been "corrected".  No longer is the definition so rigid as to say a single database for a CMDB.  There are many trusted sources for configuration information within a company and the goal is to federate those up to a "knowledge management" system. 

Hank Marquis has an excellent article in the DITY newsletter describing the changes. 

Have not posted in quite awhile due to some responsibility changes.  I am hoping to be posting a little more regularly now that things have settled.

In case you missed it, Microsoft has updated the MOF Self Assessment tool. 

Tool Overview

The Microsoft Operations Framework Self-Assessment Tool is based on the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. It guides you through the development of a detailed problem-and-impact analysis of a targeted IT service or operational process. This tool is designed to enable you to:

Once you complete a 15- to 20-minute assessment, you receive a detailed report including the assessment data, a problem statement, a summary of impacts on the organization, and a customized next-step list of recommendations to help remediate the identified problem.

Came across the http://www.itilpeople.com/ site today and it is a good way to start if you are unfamiliar with ITIL concepts and want to learn more.

On this site are links to concepts, training, products, forums, and more.

I had the great pleasure of attending training this week at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).  I attended the summer session at CISR which comprised classes on:

• IT Portfolios and Business Agility
• Enterprise Architecture as Strategy
• IT Risk and Oversight
• IT Governance and Leadership
• IT-Enabled Change: The Human Dimension

For those with an IT governance focus, these classes are a must.  It is by far the best training, from an IT mgmt perspective, that I have attended.  The classes were very well structured with pertinent and dynamic guest speakers including:

• Jeff Sampler, Oxford University
• Rob Cohen, Vice President of Information Systems & Chief Information Officer, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals
• James Cash, Board Member, GE, Microsoft, Wal-Mart
• Pat Hewlett, Chief Information Officer, Exxon Mobil
• Omar Baig, Senior Information Officer, International Finance Corporation
• Martin Curley, Director, IT Innovation, Intel Corporation
• John Petrey, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, TD Banknorth
• John Cross, Former Group CIO, British Petroleum

In addition to the guest speakers, there is a wealth of information presented by:

• Peter Weill, Director, CISR & Senior Research Scientist
• Jeanne Ross, Principle Research Scientist
• George Westerman, Research Scientist

Kudos to Peter, Jeanne, and George.  They provided some excellent information that I highly recommend.  I will be summarizing and posting more on specific learnings in future posts.

Mike Turner has an MS Press book coming out soon on the Microsoft Solutions Framework.  I encourage you all to get a copy when it is available.  Mike has long been an expert on MSF and his learnings will provide some great insight into understanding and adopting the framework. 

“Get the hands-on guidance you need to understand how to work with the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), Version 4. MSF is a deliberate and disciplined approach to technology projects based on a defined set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, guidelines, and proven practices from Microsoft. MSF has a long history of helping teams and organizations become more successful in delivering business-driven technology solutions to their customers.”

Pretty good article here on ITIL adoption and MOF implementation.  To quote from the article:

“In February 2004, Microsoft consultants descended on ACC’s operations center for a one-week assessment of help-desk procedures for managing problems, changes, configurations and upgrades. The Microsoft team then issued a report, 10 percent of which was a snapshot of observations and 90 percent of which offered recommendations the command could act on.  Center officials immediately started implementing the recommendations, and their work continues. Among the improvements:

• IT managers are better able to identify and prioritize resources for the most critical IT infrastructure problems.
• Managers can track relationships between system changes and network availability.
• A formalized process now exists for requesting, analyzing and approving configuration changes.

What can MOF do for you?

Tony put up a great list of ITIL and MOF links in a recent post.  If you have others that aren’t listed, please let one of us know.

You can find the list by clicking here.

One of the common results to a service improvement project is the stagnation that takes place after the initial assessment, design, and implementation.  A “version 1” is typically realized but once the process changes are in place, the ball gets dropped and a repetitive assessment never takes place.

The goal of the MOF Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) is to make this continuous improvement actionable and achievable to help ensure that you are successful with process changes to IT operations.

In addition, the MOF CIR assists IT service management staff by identifying areas of improvement based on business value, impact on IT personnel, and the ability to gain a “quick win” versus a long term improvement project.  Once these areas have been identified, then the CIR prescribes concise direction for focusing your service improvement efforts where they can benefit you the most.

The MOF CIR  is based on the best practice guidance contained in MOF version 3, and is positioned for compatibility with future releases of MOF and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It has three distinct components:

1. MOF Service Management Assessment

2. MOF Service Improvement Program (SIP)

3. MOF Service Management Guidance

If you are currently using the free Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) solution for SMS 2003 or are evaluating this functionality, there is a great blog on MSDN which digs into the technical details of this software.

In case you are unfamiliar with DCM, this solution will allow you to automate the validation of configuration management data that you are collecting with SMS.  DCM also ties into Service Monitoring and Control by utilizing MOM to alert on any “out of compliance” items.

From the documentation, “Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) enables you to author desired configuration manifests, and to monitor and report on compliance of your computers against a desired configuration. DCM strengthens the Microsoft systems management platform by checking for undesired configuration changes across multiple configuration sources.”

Just came across a great article at www.govtech.net on ITIL adoption in the US.  The author, Chad Vander Veen, delves into why this has taken off so much in the US the last few years, the expanded adoption in government IT, and where things are going in v3.0. 

It mentions that some in government circles “are finding that ITIL is renewing the focus on serving customers needs. The consolidation movement sweeping the nation would be utterly pointless if it didn't improve the functions of an organization. And in government, the primary function is serving the public.”

If you are new to ITIL and why this is becoming such a hot topic, this article is a good starting point.

Need sound operational and technical assistance to setup a production emulated development and test environment?  Need this environment to support change and release management? If the answers are yes, then I highly recommend you examine the WSSRA (Windows Server System Reference Architecture) Virtual Environments for Development and Test solution or WSSRA-VE for short.  This is part of the overall WSSRA which outlines a standardized infrastructure architecture.  The goal of WSSRA is to establish a foundation upon which organizations can design and implement solutions on the Microsoft architecture with more speed and less risk and cost.

The purpose of the WSSRA-VE is to show how to design and build an accurate emulation of a corporate enterprise data center such as the one designed and documented in WSSRA, but altered to be used by development and test teams.

So, how does this fit into MOF and process initiatives?  There is extensive guidance in the Operations document as part of this solution (contained in the download from the link above) which ties this solution into the operating quadrant, virtual team, and various SMFs in the Optimizing quadrant.  Roles and responsibilities are documented and skills required to setup and operate in this environment.

This is extensive guidance.  Don’t download expecting some light reading.  This is very detailed and meant to be distilled within a project team to implement this solution.

Evergreen Systems, a consulting firm based in Sterling, VA, recently reported its findings from an ITIL benchmark study.  They surveyed 167 people representing 108 companies and organizations at the 5th Annual IT Service Management Forum annual conference.

Some results that jumped out at me from this study…

• 57% of those surveyed have a budgeted and approved ITIL project underway in the next 6 months.
• Top 3 business drivers for using ITIL are Service Quality, IT to Business alignment, and Process Efficiency
• 75% plan to create, fully integrate, and maintain an active CMDB while only 24% have reached IT-wide consensus on a common model for configuration items (CIs).

Read a news article summarizing the results here on Business Wire.

Are you very familiar with ITIL concepts and wonder why implement MOF?  A new white paper on MOF: An Actionable and Prescriptive Approach to ITIL has been published to the Microsoft Download Center.  This white paper explains how MOF builds on and extends (or adopts and adapts if you like those words better) ITIL, to provide improved and actionable guidance for IT operations.

The paper goes into the contrast of ITIL being more descriptive and MOF being more prescriptive with process driven tools and best practices.  A great comparison table shows specific topics, how ITIL defines them, and how MOF expands on what ITIL covers.  For example:

Topic Area –

• Business Perspective

ITIL Definition –

• Business continuity management, partnerships and outsourcing, surviving change, and transformation of business practices through radical change.
• Looks at IT in business terms as a means of improving services and reducing costs.
• Includes cross-organizational integration with IT services and decision-making governance.

How MOF Expands on ITIL –

• Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) applies business perspectives to IT as a strategic asset.
• Helps companies assess current service management and form a Service Improvement Program (SIP) based on business value.
• Changing Quadrant highlights best practices for planning and managing change.
• MOF Team Model defines roles and responsibilities for a transparent decision-making process.
  

There is a valuable section that highlights the solution accelerators which help automate key service management scenarios.  Solutions like:

• Exchange Service Management
• Business Desktop Deployment
• Patch Management
• Service Monitoring

This is a quick and easy to read document.  If you require further reading, links to additional detail are provided within it. 

From the Desired Configuration Monitoring user guide…

“Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) enables you to author desired configuration manifests, and to monitor and report on compliance of your computers against a desired configuration. DCM thereby strengthens the Microsoft systems management platform by checking for undesired configuration changes across multiple configuration sources.
DCM uses the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) as the underlying compliance-checking engine, Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 for the targeting, deployment, and scheduling mechanism, and Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services as the reporting infrastructure. In addition, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 can be used as the alerting infrastructure.”

When we look at Configuration Management from a MOF / ITIL perspective, the goal of configuration management is to ensure that only authorized components, referred to as configuration items (CIs), are used in the IT environment and that all changes to CIs are recorded and tracked throughout the component’s life cycle. To achieve this goal, the configuration management process includes the following objectives:

• To identify configuration items and their relationships and add them to the configuration management database (CMDB).
• To enable access to the CMDB and CIs by other SMFs.
• To update and change CIs following changes to IT components during the release management process.
• To establish a review process that ensures that the CMDB accurately reflects the production IT environment.

If you already have SMS 2003 SP1 and MOM 2005 already in place, this tool can help support your configuration mgmt process by automating some of the review process to ensure that CMDB matches production configuration and also ensure that unauthorized changes to production don’t go unnoticed.

I saw an email recommending ITpreneurs.com as an excellent source for training classes.  They offer traditional classroom delivered, e-learning (self paced, virtual instructor led), and Virtual Classroom style training.

They have courses on:

• MOF
• ITIL
• COBIT
• HDI
• BS15000

Here is a link to their online catalog of classes.

FYI, I made a dangerous move and started messing around with CSS to give my blog a different look.  If you have any issues viewing it on the web, please let me know.