The CMDB Federation Consortium: An Insider's Perspective

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of spending some time with two IBMers who are involved in what may be one of the most important industry initiatives related to IT Service Management (ITSM) in this decade. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Federation consortium was announced on April 11, 2006 with founding members IBM, HP, BMC, Fujitsu and later CA. The goal, as the press release stated, "Working together, the companies will develop an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other data repositories. As a multi-vendor specification, it will provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications, and middleware." After the announcement, industry buzz varied. I recall reading trade magazine, press releases and blog entries that varied from excitement, reserved optimism and overall skepticism.

As a practitioner myself, I understand the challenges of having multiple sources of data and information within the IT environment and the importance of establishing a single authoritative and accurate source to underpin ITSM activities and processes. The challenge of achieving that single source goal increases with each vendor and technology approach, degree of openness and flexibility and the ever present internal politics around silos of data.

My discussion last week with John van Son and Mark Johnson will be the first of what I hope will be many "Insider's Perspective" interviews over the course of the consortium's efforts this year. My goals for the initial meeting were to find out more about the consortium, just how "real" it was behind the "token" press release, and what the group had accomplished so far. My findings were pleasantly surprising. In future discussions as the group progresses, I hope to share more on how the group’s efforts are progressing. Below are some highlights from our conversation.

Thank you John and Mark for your time today. I greatly appreciate your taking the time to enable me to bring this idea to life. Briefly tell me about your roles here at IBM and with the CMDB Federation Consortium.

John van Son: My name is John van Son and I work in Tivoli Business Development. One of my roles is in the area of establishing and maintaining relationships with 3rd parties outside of IBM such as partners, competitors, standards groups and alliances. I am the lead IBM representative for things related to the business, marketing and legal aspects of the CMDB Federation initiative.

Mark Johnson: My name is Mark Johnson and I work in the Tivoli Office of the CTO. My responsibilities include strategy, architecture and standards works as they relate to the IBM Tivoli group. I am an architect for ITSM and the IBM technical lead for the CMDB Federation specification.

Thank you for sharing your background and roles. It sounds like we've got a great group involved in this effort. Has the CMDB Federation Consortium met yet?

John van Son: Yes. We've had two face to face meetings to date. Our initial meeting was a business meeting where we focused on putting together the consortium. Our second meeting was a technical meeting where we discussed and began the work of developing the specification. We've had numerous teleconference and email collaboration sessions over the past several months. There are usually sub-group meetings taking place every week.

Wow, it sounds like no time was wasted kicking off the initiative! Can you share some of the highlights from your first two face to face meetings?

John van Son: One of the key accomplishments of these meetings was the drafting and agreement of the consortium's mission statement, goals and objectives. These were discussed in detail and agreed upon by all members during the last meeting.

Mark Johnson: We presented a draft strawman of ideas and concepts that we thought should be tackled by the group. We discussed ways to approach these work areas and how to organize to best utilize the technical strengths and interests of those in the group. We've divided into five sub-groups of three to four people each who are taking on specific areas of research and collaboration. These sub-groups meet weekly via their preferred collaboration technologies. Five additional workgroups will be formed in the coming months as the initial work done by these groups concludes.

Can you share a little bit more on the make up of the consortium? Has a leadership or facilitating structure been created?

John van Son: Yes, there's nothing formal per say. We've broken into two groups within the consortium - the Technical Group (Mark Johnson, Dave Ehnebuske, and Robert Orr from IBM) and the Business Group. IBMers have taken a very active role in this initiative from the very beginning, from proposing the initial strawman, driving the business side of the consortium, and generally moving the group along.

With regards to the technical working groups, can you share at a high level some of the key functional or problem areas that have been identified for work efforts?

Mark Johnson: The Technical Group has identified and formed sub-groups that are focusing on Architecture, Documentation (vision, scope, deliverables, and plans), Glossary, Usage Scenarios and Identity and Aliasing Service. Future sub-group work areas include Versioning, Federated Data Model, Authorization, Query, Subscription and Import/Export Exchange Formats.

It sounds like a lot of thought has been put into identifying these work group areas. These problems are certainly not unique to solving CMDB federation challenges but are often found in many other IT areas.

Mark Johnson: Correct. The challenges of federating CMDBs are not at all new. These problems have existed within various areas of IT for years. The group agreed early on that we would review and consider any and all applicable existing works, standards and specifications in meeting our goals and objectives. What the group doesn't want to do is throw away everything other initiatives have gone to great effort to accomplish and think that we have to recreate the wheel. This is very important to the group and an ever present philosophy in everything we're trying to do in the consortium.

John van Son: I agree and want to reemphasize everything that Mark said. Wherever there are existing or emerging standards we are looking to those to solve as much of the problem as we can before trying to figure out another way to do it. The specifications that we'll bring forward will be calling upon any number of other standards and specifications already available.

I look forward to learning more about how the sub-groups progress in their work areas. Can you share some on the timeline being proposed by the consortium?

John van Son: Yes. We are planning for additional face to face meetings over the next several months. The culmination of our meetings will be the publication of a draft specification. Our plan is to do this by the end of the year. This specification will be made available for industry review and comment before we submit it to a recognized standards body.

Another highlight event will be the adding of more members to the consortium. Others have already been invited, more will be invited over the next month or two and I anticipate all of them joining in the future.

That's great news! Growing the consortium's membership will go a long way towards a specification that covers a broader array of technologies, scenarios and approaches and should increase future adoption and integration. Who's representing the practitioner's perspective - those who are trying to implement a federated CMDB today?

John van Son: That's a great question. This area was discussed and covered in our last face-to-face meeting. I'm pleased to say that we've begun a process of seeking "feedback partners" from the industry such as customers, integrators, consultants, etc.

That's music to my ears! How is the group working with the practitioner community at large (ITSMF, User Groups, etc.)?

John van Son: We see participation from the practitioner community happening in a couple different ways. First, we’ve been in touch with ITSMF about our initiative since the beginning and they have publicly endorsed our efforts.

As I mentioned earlier, we've started a process to establish "feedback partners" that will be made up of customers, integrators, consultants, etc. These are people who are working on building, deploying and supporting CMDBs today or have a strong interest or specialty in some of the problem areas the group is trying to solve.

Another way for the practitioner community to get involved will be by providing comments on the draft specification once it's published for industry review. We'll have a formal process for this and would encourage as much participation as possible by the industry and practitioner communities.

There have been comments on this initiative as being just another vendor driven attempt at showing a good face. Some spoke of previous vendor efforts at standardization that soon fell apart as vendor motives and politics got involved. Others question why the need for another standard when other promising ones have been proposed such as CIM and DCML. What's being done to make the CMDB Federation Consortium different and to increase chances of success in the future?

Mark Johnson: From a technical perspective, we're not out to recreate the wheel. The group is reviewing and considering all previous works that may be applicable to the problems we're trying to solve. If something looks like it will work, we're going to consider using it and even furthering those efforts along based on this initiative.

John van Son: Given the make-up of these kinds of groups—mostly competitors—there are certainly some politics involved in any effort like this. I doubt that is likely to change. In the grand scheme of things, I've seen far less politics involved in this effort than similar ones that I've been involved with.

The overall spirit of this group has been one of strong cooperation and collaboration. The CMDB Federation consortium may be somewhat different than other efforts. Why? Our customers have been the ones driving us to do this! The reality is that our customer’s have heterogeneous IT environments—products from many different vendors, many of whom are members of this group—and it's likely to stay that way. The need for a federated solution has never been as great as it is now. I believe this effort has come together more easily than many other efforts have in the past because it really is customer driven!

That's very reassuring. Maybe there will be some lessons learned from this effort that can be applied to similar efforts in the future. How will the consortium members measure their success?

John van Son: Successes will be measured along the way. Near term success will be the documenting and publishing of a specification for CMDB federation for industry review. A ratified specification that’s brought forward to a leading standards body in the future will be another major event for the group. Then, publication of the specification as a standard by a recognized standards body.

The ultimate measure of success will be the industry itself actually incorporating or implementing the specifications/standards in what they do and customers adopting the technology in such a way that benefits them. All the rest doesn't matter if no one adopts the standard in their technology.

John, Mark I want to sincerely thank you for your time today. I know you both are very busy with this effort and all of your other IBM responsibilities. I look forward to our future discussions on the CMDB Federation Consortium and the group's progress towards creating and publishing a CMDB federation specification and ultimately a formal standard.

Doug McClure
Consulting IT Architect
Business and IT Service Management (BSM/ITSM)
IBM Software Services for Tivoli (ISST) - Netcool
e: dmcclure@us.ibm.com
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net