Comments on: “Federationing” http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/673 IT management in a changing IT world Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:41:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Rahul Sachdev http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/673#comment-95885 Rahul Sachdev Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:35:57 +0000 http://stage.vambenepe.com/?p=673#comment-95885 I enjoyed reading your post. I wholeheartedly agree with your (and Glenn's) assertion that federation MDRs is really the only practical approach to creating a unified view of the IT data. I see a lot of parallels in the current discussion and one that I saw 10 years ago around unification of another data domain i.e. customer data (e.g. CRM, billing, order management systems). That resulted in a completely new product category called Master Data Management. I would urge your readers to take the marketing message from the big IT vendors with a big pinch of salt. Of course they want the customer to buy everything from them. However the idea of a customer standardizing all of their IT management systems from one big vendor is neither practical nor smart. Why would a customer want to replace all their existing IT management systems (i.e. MDRs) if they are working fine? And why would they want a single vendor lock-in? So a multi-vendor world is here to stay and the only solution to solving the problem is federation. I would add two things to your post: 1) It doesn't have to be about full federation or full decentralization. Hybrid approaches can also work i.e. centralize (replicate) some data that needs frequent access and analysis. But you need to determine why you need the unified data in the first place e.g. compliance, release management, forecasting, process streamlining etc. 2) Pay close attention to your processes especially those outlined in ITIL v3 e.g. security management, change management etc. Thanks for an interesting post. I enjoyed reading your post. I wholeheartedly agree with your (and Glenn’s) assertion that federation MDRs is really the only practical approach to creating a unified view of the IT data. I see a lot of parallels in the current discussion and one that I saw 10 years ago around unification of another data domain i.e. customer data (e.g. CRM, billing, order management systems). That resulted in a completely new product category called Master Data Management.

I would urge your readers to take the marketing message from the big IT vendors with a big pinch of salt. Of course they want the customer to buy everything from them. However the idea of a customer standardizing all of their IT management systems from one big vendor is neither practical nor smart. Why would a customer want to replace all their existing IT management systems (i.e. MDRs) if they are working fine? And why would they want a single vendor lock-in? So a multi-vendor world is here to stay and the only solution to solving the problem is federation. I would add two things to your post:
1) It doesn’t have to be about full federation or full decentralization. Hybrid approaches can also work i.e. centralize (replicate) some data that needs frequent access and analysis. But you need to determine why you need the unified data in the first place e.g. compliance, release management, forecasting, process streamlining etc.
2) Pay close attention to your processes especially those outlined in ITIL v3 e.g. security management, change management etc.

Thanks for an interesting post.

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