Within the past five years, CIOs have seen a broad shift from focusing on the technology aspects of IT management to concentrating on the service management aspects, especially emphasis on how these services help businesses succeed.  For example, version 3 of the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL v3 has a more logical and intuitive structure than ITIL v2. As a result, people can relate better to this new framework in ITIL v3. Each of the five ITIL v3 books centers on a service lifecycle, such as service strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual service improvement.  Because of the lifecycle approach, people can drill down on the portions of the IT issues and problems they're having at a particular time, and get the answers they need.

Business service management or BSM and configuration database management or CMDB have always been a focus on ITIL. However, ITIL v3 now acknowledges both BSM and CMDB.  ITIL v3 has renamed CMDB as the configuration management system and also has changed the definition to bring all of an organization's configuration management together. To this end, an organization will have a number of CMDBs, some of which will be specialized, such as server management. Through federation, all of these CMDBs will represent an organization's configuration management system.

Paul Burns, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a consultancy that specializes in all aspects of IT management, says that BSM and CMDB will spread the adoption of ITIL v3. He says, "Now that ITIL is talking about BSM and CMDB, you have all of the vendors talking about ITIL, too."

In this podcast, Burns, who specializes in BSM, discusses EMA's research findings from a survey called Winning Strategies on CMDB Adoption. He also discusses what IT organizations might consider in developing a CMDB strategy or a BSM strategy, what features to look for in BSM or CMDB products, and what questions to ask vendors about their products.

Bio
For the past two years, Paul Burns has been a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), based in Boulder, Colorado. Before joining EMA, he held a variety of leadership positions at Hewlett-Packard for more than 20 years. Burn's working relationship with HP's OpenView group provided him with extensive exposure to IT management. He earned both a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.B.A. from Colorado State University.

Resources
Service Catalog - To Build or To Buy - CIO Update
Who Is Stealing Your BSM Thunder - CIO Update
Free IT Management Resources from EMA

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production