CMDB

In ITIL, a Service Level Agreement is a set of Service Level Targets. Somebody please tell the vendors.

As promised in a comment recently, I have published an article on ITSM Watch about "on-demand CMDB". The idea is that we only need to keep a minimum of data in the CMDB and we assemble the rest as needed.

Much of what we read about CMDB is actually singing the praises of asset management, network discovery or other simpler technologies. Other benefits attributed to CMDB actually come from process improvement and do not depend on the technology at all. When all you want to sell is a hammer...

ITSM Watch might do me out of business soon... but it is great to see some good IT skepticism. [Updated: fixed a link]

Here is a high Crap Factoid alert from Chokey the Chimp:
We recently demolished the EMA paper on CMDB adoption but nevertheless the paper in question is being misquoted by bITaPlanet as saying that "there’s been a dramatic jump in the number of companies that have completed their CMDB, from just 9 percent in 2006 to one-third in 2008". This is nonsense but it is nonsense that is now turning up elsewhere. Be on alert and keep the CFirehose ready.

As Don Tennant pointed out, ITSM is not the most exciting subject. Some days I'm just over it. On those days, this is my kind of CMDB: the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles.

I got whipped in the stock market bubble like many people, so I'm the last to read too much into graphs any more, but nevertheless I always find Google Trends interesting.

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There are some fundamental fallacies behind the arguments for CMDB and a recent article encapsulated a number of them. Why do we keep getting told a CMDB is essential when almost nobody has one?

You can have CMDB for free.