It was  a pleasant, breezy evening in the “Marina Beach” (world’s second longest beach) with the family. Several colorful kites were flying and fighting for air space.. and my daughter wanted to get one… Immediately I approached the boy who was selling kites (for those who are unfamiliar to chennai (India), it is a common sight to see little kids (age 7 – 11) selling stuff in the beach)

He was very pleasant and informed us that his boss has increased the kite price that evening.. (due to favorable weather conditions!)
As i was discussing with the kite seller, the little boss appeared (little more than 3  ft tall) with confidence brimming on his face. Told me that he wants be a ‘business man’ in future..

He said he cannot reduce the price of kite, but offered balloon(s) as a discounted rate.. (and even gave it to my younger daughter to DEMO!)

Few things I learnt from this budding business man (boy!)

1. Business sense
2. Pricing your commodity
3. Clear communication to the team
4. Upselling

The young boy is one of 300 million kids in India with a positive outlook.. Kudos to the true entrepreneurship, democracy and free market!

You should have completed the following steps:-

1. Defined your CI Types in your organization that you want to track (Computers, Laptops, Software, Routers, Servers)

2. Discovered your CI instances (Actual names of devices or Assets)

3. Documented further details (what? Where? How? Why? Who? and If?)– CMDB Expanded List

a. What is the CI?
b. Where is it?
c. Why it is required?
d. Who is using it?
e. How it is linked to other CIs?
f. If the CI is mission critical?  (Some organizations have Disaster Recovery plans defined for these CIs)

Again, our mission to build the CMDB is rooted in the desire to build an IT environment towards availability, manageability,  and serviceability. Being an IT Administrator it is our top most goal to do it with efficiency!

Service Desk Alignment of CMDB — Why?

Lot of people struggle to improve their service desk performance after achieving certain levels. If you are the ones tracking ‘First-Call Resolution’ and if it remains around ’72′ for a long time, thinking on these lines may help

1. Knowledge base – Quick access to Incidents, Problems, Resolutions, FAQ with some tag lines or key words

2. History Tracking – Information specific to the user or the asset related to the incident and past experiences

3. Expertise – Skill set pertaining to the services that you provide to customers

Easier than said, how do you go about building one? How it is related to your CMDB?

Identify the top CIs (from your CMDB that you already have) and try to align it with the Services you provide.

For example, if you have IT Services –> E-Mail –> Exchange, then the following  CIs may be related to the service offered (Exchange Server(s), ISA Servers (if any), Spam Control Server, Firewall Server)

Or let us say, if you have IT Services –> Hardware –> Network Printers, then any network printer in the environment would qualify as related CI

Why this would help?

There is a very close relationship between the user experience and CIs they utilize on a daily basis. Customers generally point to the IT / Helpdesk  Department for any kind of problem they experience utilizing any CI. Assume the frustration of anyone who is in a domain environment that

1. experiences delays in user login time

2. limits access to common IT  resources in the same network

3. prompts for different login/passwords while accessing different applications

There are multitude reasons why the above listed examples may occur in an environment, but it becomes the responsibility of the IT administrator(s) to take care of them sooner or later.

If you start defining your Services and track the corresponding CI(s) as part of your helpdesk process, you tackle them easily and effectively.

Service Desk Alignment of CMDB— How?

Whether you have an existing Incident Management system, or building one, work out a process that would enable capturing ‘Affected CI’ information as part of the service request submission. Please remember that there may be scenarios when the service request has no corresponding CI relationship.  This can be achieved by

a. Customizing your existing system using ‘custom fields’ that would refer to the CMDB
b. Exploring CMDB alignment for your Service Desk

Keep the solution very simple and that is key to derive useful reports out of the system.

You should be able to choose a given CI and see all the corresponding incidents or problems, total time taken to resolve them, cost invested and actual TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the CI

Similarly, choose a given user, asset owned, corresponding incidents, IT expenses for that user / department (for any charge backs – prevalent in local government organizations)

Service Desk Alignment of CMDB– Benefits

1. Improved Service Desk performance

2. Increase in First Call Resolution Rate (primarily due to history tracking)

3. Knowledgebase Improvements – techs would be able to relate to similar incidents and also run metrics on similar CIs

4. Vendor evaluation — For example, you will have the ability to compare incidents on DELL / HP  for the past 6 months or 1 year  and make decisions

5. Decision Support – Contract renewal decisions, budgetary proposals for resources, utilization metrics, asset life cycle planning and several other IT tasks would be supported by the reports generated out of the above designed system

6. Exceed customer expectations as they can see the benefits and value of your IT team

Suri Anantharama, PMP provides ITIL consulting for organizations and assists in building CMDB

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CMDB  ( Configuration management database ) is a buzz word in Infrastructure management forums and I know lot of local / state goverments budgeting for it every year.  Sometimes they never get to spend it due to the following reasons:-

1. Lack of clear understanding of the CMDB life cycle

2. Constantly changing definitions of  a realiable CMDB that is aligned with other Service Desk aspects

3. ITIL masked vendors trying to push their products rather than helping CIOs understand what is involved

I am writing this to clarify certain aspects and ease the understanding!

CMDB – Step 1 – Define your CI

ITIL defines enterprise assets that are configurable as CI (from a layman standpoint this includes Desktops, Laptops, Routers, Servers, Blackberry Devices, Printers, Mail Servers, Gateway, etc)

You have to come out with a high level list with types of assets that you want to track. I would call it as ‘CI Types’

Deliverable — CI Types

Example — DELL Laptops, HP Printers, Blackberry devices, Cisco Routers, SAP Servers, Exchange Servers, AS400

CMDB – Step 2 – Discover your CI instances

Discovering assets in any organization can be real tough and it involves automated discovery, physical audit, finding it by chance, and manual addition of known assets. You can use free tools available in the market to do the basic discovery that uses techniques like WMI, SNMP, SSH to discover CIs across the network.

Now the output of this exercise can be really huge and that is where people get lost!

Look at Step 1 deliverable and filter your list using CI Types and this would ensure that you are dealing with the assets that you want to track rather than everything!

Deliverable – CMDB Master List

Consolidated List of all CI that you want to track and important physical attributes like Name, IP Address, Make, Model, Serial #, MAC Address, and Purpose (why it is there in the first place?)

Example — ATLXPL1540, 10.34.1.9, DELL, Dimension 2400, 1FD340,00-0D-54-EB-43-GD, radiology lab system

Generally this list would be a grand sum of count of all your computers, network equipment, licensed software (if you choose track them as assets), etc.  (Commonly it is called as Hardware and Software assets)

Once you have this list, SMILE and RELAX for a week!

After a week, look at the list again and see how much it has changed by doing some sample tests. This is to measure the volatile nature of your CIs – so that you can improve the discovery process to keep them updated as much as possible. Some of my customers use ‘Periodic Auto Discovery’ mechanisms to keep the CMDB up to date.

CMDB – Step 3 – Gather more information on your CI

You have to work the list to find additional information about your assets. Think of the following:-

a. How long we have the CI in our environment? Life Cycle details

b. Who is responsible for it? Is it a Mission Critical CI? Owner

c. Is it under warranty? If so, gather all details with contact information -  External support

d. where is the CI located? Physical location attributes

e. What are the availability expecations? Who ensures it? (Linked to SLA definitions)

Attach any documents, service contracts, manuals to the CI

f. Identify CI dependencies and relationships — This is critical!

If you have helpdesk Server as CI with a corresponding 50-inch LCD monitor for dashboard display, the monitor becomes the depending accessory. Again, sometimes only the accessory CIs are visible to outside world – once you dig deep you may find some other CIs (that was unnoticed during Step 1 or 2)

If  you are tracking Agilent BioCel 1800 system as one of your CI, VWorks automation control and Direct Drive robot would be your CI dependencies. While handling CI dependies you can either define additional CI Types and include a relationship or keep more like a Parent-child matrix

Also, 2 different CIs may have a relationship and mutual dependency (CRM Server and SQL Server 2008)

Deliverable — CMDB Expanded List

At any point of time, you should be able to link the CMDB master record with corresponding lifecycle details, Owner, vendor information, physical location, availability matrix and dependent CI information

< In our next series, we will discuss CMDB reporting, TCO, and Service Desk Integration > —  Read Now!!

Suri Anantharama, PMP provides ITIL consulting for organizations and assists in building CMDB

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champion

It was a dream realized!

French Open finals has been a tough thing for Roger Federer for years with his nemesis Rafael Nadal winning for the past 4 years. Every time he lost there were millions of viewers across the Globe shed tears for this gentleman. Roger persisted and like a phoenix he comes back from ashes and wins it this time.

I would say part of the championship credit goes to Soderling who broke Nadal’s unbelievable run in French Open. Who said Tennis is one-man show?? It is a team game and Roger had the help of Soderling to conquer the Roland Garros – It would have been anybody’s game if Nadal had made it to finals. Way to go Federer!!

Game Changer — 4 Aces from Federer in the Second Set Tie-Breaker changed things for good.

President Obama Vision for new peaceful world

It doesn’t happen everyday!
Support for the President from a staunch believer of capitalism, free market and less Government!

President Obama deserves a standing ovation for his inspiring speech for the Muslim world. He is the only American today who has the charisma to deliver such a speech for moderate Arab audience and bring them in to the fold of those who are defending the world.

It is easier said than done as East & West have fueled the hatred over decades (if not centuries, if we count on the crusades!) leading to the complicated problem of Terrorism that has no value for peace loving citizens.

President has articulated the message very well and hopefully the Muslim world will react positively. We can create a new beginning that promises peaceful co-existence and prevent arms race in the middle east / south east Asia.

Let us all support our president across party lines and stand united for a better world!

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The club has 20+ members and already achieved Presidents distinguished club award for 2008-09 – thanks to the hard work of Candy, Bill, William, Jami, Jon and other active members.

Life Lesson – simple act can produce significant results if you don’t expect anything back. The club was started 2 years back and it is the sole TM club north of Gainesville in GA. Lot of interested souls got together and supported the effort. Today it stands tall and one of the members Jon Schwartz won the ‘District Table Topics Contest’ last year. Every Wednesday, they discuss various topics of relevance for every American!

Check them out.. you may learn something..

Roy Ash Jr. Community Room
89 Jarrard St, Cleveland, GA, 30528, United States

706-892-7583

http://www.linkedin.com/in/surianantharama