Making sure we correctly design and maintain the relationships between the 'pieces' of our business and IT infrastructure are the jobs of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Configuration Management (CM). On recent work engagement, we recently released a couple of processes to maintain Documentation and Software / Hardware pieces (called Configuration Items or CIs in the CM world), so I've started to learn something about this process area. A meeting last week touched on potential integration points between our Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling tool, ARIS, and the soon to be coming-online Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) in Remedy. (BTW...EA includes Business Architecture, which is where we're using ARIS the most currently and is my main focus these days). As I've pondered this a bit since then, there is a lot of overlap in the core data maintained in both the Enterprise Architecture and Configuration Management process areas...these Configuration Items. EA seems to be concerned with designing these CIs (which include business processes CIs as well as the hardware and software CIs that support those processes) and the relationships between them (with the relationships being the important thing) and CM is concerned with communicating the change in t hese CIs as they move from development into production environments (making sure everyone is aware of the impacts of CI change and correctly plans for it). ARIS provides a tool to graphically build relationships between CIs including new potential CIs and existing CIs (re-use is important!). Remedy and other CMDB tools serve a similar role, although they are more concerned with maintaining those existing CIs and relationships that exist in the currently deployed environment (as opposed to the in-design / proposed / nirvana CIs and relationships built during the development cycle).
I say all of this to let those of us interested in EA and CM know that there are a couple of bloggers I've recently discovered taking about this same thing.
Serge Thorn's IT Blog covered a late-April CMDB vendor initiative (BMC, IBM, HP) in a post a couple of weeks ago...an excerpt:
"Very often information is spread among various sources and no standards exist on how to exchange meta data from all these potential sources of CMDB information. Today, the CMDB interfaces that exist are all proprietary, which is the problem that this group wants to tackle."
And the ServiceCatalog blog chimed in (and connected us to Serge), linking integration of islands of CM information (from EA and CM efforts, for instance) via standards (or the lack thereof):
"Serge brings an excellent point on CMDB integration -- standards are missing. And no market really grows without standards. "
These are a couple of bloggers to keep track of...so I've added them to the blogroll.
Posted by outlawv at December 19, 2006 09:01 AM