ITIL Data Management volume

I finally broke down and purchased the online copy of the ITIL "Data Management" volume. This is part of their "Back Catalogue," available through TSO. (Data management is in volume 2, "The complementary guidance set.")

I was going to write a longer review of this 170-page volume, but it is simply so good that all I can say is Buy It, if you are in data management, or an IT Service Manager trying to figure out where Data Management might fit in. (Unfortunately the price is a little high, and you get 6 other books you may not need.) It's an excellent, thoughtful, concise yet nuanced overview of Data Management, covering...

- overall mission/scope/benefits of DM programs
- analysis, modeling, and definition
- ownership, security, access & privacy
- roles & responsibilities
- DM/project conflicts (!)
- software development lifecycle
- change control

and many other topics. This is a very cross-disciplinary book. Particularly interesting is an in-depth discussion of various organizational structures' implications for data management. Overall, I'd rate this volume in the top 1% of published material on data management (see my Amazon data management list).

My main lament is that this has been relegated to the ITIL back-catalog. I'd urge the DAMA leadership to make some inquiries as to possibly reviving it; the material is not that outdated from what I can see, although additional coverage of packages, XML, and enterprise application integration would be advisable.

Given ITIL's current momentum, this volume could benefit data management as a practice area greatly if it were updated. Without positioning in the ITIL framework, data management is weakened -- too many MBAs are showing up in senior IT management positions, coming over from the business and turning to the established frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, and CMM for guidance. If your capability isn't mentioned in such frameworks, you are at risk...

Repository and configuration management
One section that bears particular mention is the discussion of the "Corporate Repository." This section covers repositories from the mainframe point of view, and has the very informative mention that distributed environments "use the concept of a Configuration Management Database" for analogous purposes. The repository is seen as managed and updated through the Change Control process.

This is important evidence that the early ITIL conception of repository and CMDB were essentially the same thing, with repository seen as a mainframe concept and CMDB seen as distributed. This is one part that, while historically very interesting, needs updating. The $64k question: is a CMDB a metadata repository?

-Charlie