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... management to keep IT in sync with business needs. Weaving IT with business operations is essential, critical, vital and mightily important to your career prospects. That's not a new notion, but it was a constant refrain heard at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders conference last week in Phoenix.

Peter Armstrong of BMC Software Inc. Image Credit: Asa Mathat

Peter Armstrong amplifies that advice but also suggests something concrete to get to the hole-in-one of IT and business alignment. The corporate strategist at BMC Software Inc. in Houston says that if you're not building your own configuration management database (CMDB), you're unlikely to achieve the business service levels your company needs.
A CMDB includes information about all your IT assets, everyone who uses them and what their access privileges are for each and every asset. Armstrong, who spoke at the Premier 100 conference, argues that IT managers depend too heavily on systems metrics that are irrelevant to business users' definitions of proper service levels.
Worse, he says that most IT managers don't know the business impact of a technology problem because they lack an effective CMDB.
The answer isn't "buying technology out of the box and putting it in," Armstrong says. Rather, it's about defining the roles of your employees and the relationships among people, business processes and technology and then closely managing all changes within a CMDB.
To get the best information on how to build a proper CMDB, Armstrong, a native of the U.K., favors the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) publications produced by his home country's government -- but written by IT practitioners, not vendors or academics.
It's a pity, he deadpans, that these thick tomes are best put to use for long flights from Sydney to Los Angeles when you're having trouble falling asleep. Luckily, you can find the CliffsNotes versions, as it were, on the IT Service Management Forum's Web site. They give you all the information you need without requiring a pillow, Armstrong says.
Armstrong claims that U.S. companies are trailing their European counterparts in building ITIL-inspired CMDBs, which he thinks puts businesses in this country at a competitive disadvantage. That's because European IT shops will be able to respond to infrastructure and application problems that are the ones most critical to the business and not just the ones that pop up first in the help desk queue, he says.
Identity-driven model rivals CMDBs ...
... as a path to ITIL's alignment goals. Alan Nugent, chief technology officer at Novell Inc., puts his company's "identity-driven model"