John Zachman, configuration management guru?

3/10/2007 Followup on this:

I ran into John personally last Thursday morning at the annual DAMA/Wilshire conference; had the ITIL Blue Book with me and showed him the passage. He was quite surprised and we had a good laugh about new career horizons opening up for him....

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I am surprised that this passage from section 8.9.1 of the ITIL v2 Change Management chapter (Service Support volume) never leaped out at me before:

"John Zachman (an American Configuration Management guru) proposed some years ago that, if IT wished to follow the example of Configuration Management experts such as the aviation and engineering domains, then business and IT processes would have to be defined to an excruciating and hitherto unprecedented level of detail in order to be controlled."

It's a most peculiar passage. John Zachman (with whom I have passing acquaintance) is known as the father of Enterprise Architecture. I have never heard his name mentioned in conjunction with Configuration Management. You can see the major articles he has written, or acknowledges as influential, here:

http://www.zifa.com/bibliography.html

Nothing on Configuration Management, under that name.

But the peculiarity may be illuminating. I have read some idiosyncratic materials (can not remember where, and would be indebted for a reference) regarding configuration management, which expressed the view that true configuration management for the enterprise included "managing the configuration" of the business architecture: processes, capabilities, functions, and what have you.

I think that the ITIL change and configuration management chapters must have been written by someone of this persuasion, which (for want of a better term) I will call the "Enterprise Configuration Management" school of thought. Seeing John Zachman as a configuration management expert would be a logical extension of this point of view.

I don't have any philosophical problems with this perspective, just pragmatic and utilitarian concerns - I just don't think that the world is ready for this definition of configuration management, and in fact history is moving in a different direction.

Has anyone else encountered the Enterprise Configuration Management point of view?

Charlie

Comments

[The IT Skeptic]

I have detailed knowledge of only one vendor's CMDB schema but it does indeed include processes and functins as the higher level groupings below service.

Frankly it had never occured to me that there was any other "school" of configuration thought. If a function was not a managed entity then there would be great redundancy (de-normalisation) where a function was shared by many processes. This would make maintenenace of the relationships even more impossible :-) See first para of page 140 of the blue book.

I'm disturbed to find that this model is implicit: you've made me go back and re-read and I can't find it anywhere in the blue book. The diagram Figure 7.3 on page 139 of the blue book has it upside down, with "business system" as a sub module of "software", which I would call awful. Abstract CIs like "system" should span software, hardware and the real CIs.

I believe the alternate model arises from the red book. For example see page 33 where "services ... are themselves made up of one or more IT systems ... ask customers which services they use and how those services map onto their busienss processes". But it is still implicit.

This confusion arises from ITIL's failure to define standard or example templates of CMDB schema (or a number of other artifacts).

I've been to one of JZ's seminars. Great thinker but not CM. I am reassured that the book points out he is American: an essential qualifier for British and colonial readers