EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

The notion that the CMDB is now entering a “mature” phase
is naïve, and in many respects refuted by the high levels of innovation
attested to here. We are admittedly looking at toddlers learning
to walk, but what a transformation they may bring to the market, and to our
whole view of service management, as they take their first few steps!!

EMA has just collected some new data regarding how IT organizations are seeking to assimilate cloud services from a top-down, service management perspective. The data gathered in December of 2010, spanned 155 global respondents with high percentages of executives (better than 50% director and above) – as the goal was to understand how senior management and cross-domain organizations that usually have senior executive leadership are leveraging cloud computing.

A lot comes to mind with a title like this one.  So, let’s start by wiping away areas like politics and finances (except as they relate to IT), births, deaths, marriages and celebrities.  In fact, there’s still a very long list of possibilities by just focusing on IT and everything that goes into managing and optimizing services - let alone all of the trends around cloud.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I’ve had time to reflect on a concept that I’ve decided to call “Contrarian Accelerators.” The first name I came up with as “Perverse Accelerators” – which seemed more memorable, but a tad politically incorrect, somehow. The best adjective – and I’m open to suggestions – would fall somewhere between “contrarian” [...]

Sometimes… OK most of the time …  the terms and words we use for “things” in service management are in themselves landmines. One of the worst culprits is of course the term “CMDB” which I like to compare to ‘The Holy Roman Empire” – which as H.G. Wells pointed out was neither “holy” nor “Roman” [...]