Is it a CMDB? A metadata repository? They don't call it either; it's the "IT Data Warehouse."
DB2 Magazine (a freebie one gets with Intelligent Enterprise) has a GREAT four-page article by VP Howard Goldberg on Merrill Lynch's approach to managing internal IT data
here.
Here's an extended quote:
In order to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies, Merrill Lynch realized it needed a comprehensive picture of the environment to:
Improve productivity by making it easier for employees to find what they need
Eliminate duplicated efforts in different business units
Prevent poor decisions based on faulty information.
The information to create this comprehensive picture of the IT environment existed, but was stored in heterogeneous and fragmented data silos that were inconsistently sourced and refreshed. A simple question such as "How many servers are running Windows NT?" would generate multiple unsupported answers...The team charged with creating this comprehensive IT picture found an established infrastructure and methodology in Merrill Lynch's existing data warehouse practice....
Would love to hear some discussion of this piece and how it fits into folk's various visions of IT Service Management and Metadata Management. On the surface, it seems the CMDB might be a feed into this (that's kind of the model Merrill Lynch is using, with feeds from some management frameworks at least). However, some conceptions of CMDBs I have read imply that the CMDB is used directly for reporting and analytics - so why would one implement a separate decision-support architecture?
(The classic model is that online transactional databases replicate their data into data warehouses for analytics, but this idea hasn't been part of the ITSM discussions I've seen.)
Question I would have for Merrill Lynch: What are the processes for keeping all this data up to date? This seems very close to the traditional metadata repository approach, in which IT process is "someone else's problem." As I've noted elsewhere, this is the historic weakness of metadata as a practice.
Cheers!
Charlie
from
www.erp4it.com
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