Actually, it’s not that difficult to map your Product Categories to where they are useful for Asset Management, CMDB, and the rest of ITSM. From what I’ve seen with the CMDB and categorizations, it’s best to follow the K.I.S.S. method. I made a new class in CMDB 1 that ended up being a huge pain to maintain from the Asset Management side, so when we moved to 2, I imported those CIs as Computer Systems, and the users are much happier. If the end users don’t see any value in splitting things out into a lot of new classes, then there probably is none.
With any application work, you really need to get the users to focus on the output, so you’re right in being concerned about reporting. We’ve found some issues with our Product Categories now that we’re implementing BMC Analytics. For example, instead of going with Hardware>Computer>Desktop we went something like PC>Desktop>Standard, but BMC Analytics has “Hardware” as a filter that comes out of the box, and with the route we went, it is harder to report on hardware assets. Still, had we created new Classes, such as Desktop, Server, and Laptop, our cleanup work would be a lot more difficult than just dealing with Product Categorizations. Also I think that a lot of what BMC does is a ploy to sell professional services, but that’s just a typical thing that all vendors do. Professional Services aren’t useful in coming up with processes and ways of laying out data that your company can use though. Sure, they can offer suggestions or tell you how it was done at another company, but if they drive the process you’re going to have lots of problems and the users will be unhappy. You have to get your primary users to step up and decide how they plan to use the system and have a clear process that you make the application fit in. BMC has a problem with ITSM 7 where they try to get companies to fit their processes around ITSM, when to be successful they need to do the reverse. Shawn Pierson From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin Pulsen Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:35 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITSM 7, CMDB CI and Product Definitions ** Thank you Shawn for your reply. My concern is, and this is what I have heard from BMC, when designing your Product categories, you need to think ahead to the design of the CMDB as well. It's all interrelated and affects reporting, trending analysis etc. I find it very difficult to design my Product categories and place all of the Non-Asset items in an 'OTHER' category, only to find out 2 years down the road our CMDB is messed up and mostly useless. Was this information from BMC a ploy to sell more Professional Services? I just hope to look enough ahead of the road to see the brick wall coming at me, that's all. Thanks again, Kevin P. ** Part of the problem is that there are no good answers to your questions. By default, we put things in the BMC_ComputerSystem class, unless it fits in somewhere else. So a Blackberry technically is a computer, just a tiny one. So is a calculator. Stuff that doesn’t have a class and isn’t anything remotely close to being a computer goes in as “equipment”. I’m wary of creating new classes unless there is a demonstrable need for it that is so strong we can’t live without it. My users already hate that they have nothing in Asset Management to be able to search across the different classes (e.g. how do you find, in ITSM, all Assets located on the third floor of a certain building? The data exists, but there is no screen for users to pull that type of information.) New classes make the system harder to use. In fact, rather than creating a bunch of new classes, we’ve hidden some of the OOB classes to make the system easier to navigate. Shawn Pierson __Platinum Sponsor: www.rmsportal.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" html___ Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.sug.com/disclaimers/default.htm#Mail . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender.
