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March 14, 2005 (Computerworld) --
... 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
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" of IT asset management squarely in line with the processes outlined in ITIL publications.
"The model is very complementary to ITIL," explains Nugent, another Premier 100 speaker. Waltham, Mass.-based Novell's approach describes hardware, software, services and the changing roles that users can have with IT assets.
For example, you might be able to use a particular application on your desktop PC but not on your laptop at the corner Starbucks. The identity-driven model takes such differences into account, according to Nugent.
What's more, he says, Novell offers a virtual modeling tool that lets IT managers see the relationships among users and IT assets to make it easier to codify the correct connections.
Online service seeks to reduce ...
... head count churn by pinpointing why workers quit. WebExit is an exit-interview service designed for large companies -- many of which "find it nearly impossible to interview departing employees and then compile and track the data," claims Beth Carvin, CEO of Nobscot Corp., the Kailua, Hawaii-based developer of WebExit. Exit-interview information is primarily entered into paper forms, she says, and the typical human resources administrator "just pushes them aside."
Ric Heimke agrees. He's vice president and national director of staffing at Sedgwick Claims Management Services Inc., a Memphis-based administrator of insurance claims. Before Heimke started applying insights gleaned from WebExit, annual turnover at his 4,000-person company was in "the mid-20% range," he says.
But since Sedgwick began using WebExit two years ago, the turnover rate has dropped to about 16%. Heimke says it costs Sedgwick one-third of an employee's annual salary to train a new worker, so the savings from improved worker retention have been "huge." Looking at the data, Heimke has also been able to identify problems such as understaffing, training gaps and manager miscues and then apply remedies.
WebExit uses a standard set of questions that can be customized by users, Carvin says. New to the service this year are industry benchmarks -- the first one, for the financial services industry, will be available this month. Cost is about $2,500 per month for a large organization.
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