CMDB Federation White Paper

Well, we did it!

The CMDBF Consortium^* has completed its first objective, which is a white paper describing the proposed approach to federating multiple "Management Data Repositories" into a "Federated CMDB."

I am proud to be part of the team that developed this white paper (I was the editor and sometimes lightning rod on this task).  We started our committee work on specifications and UML models, then morphed the specs into a white paper, and finally re-structured the white paper into a more "human readable" form.  Then end result is a good description of the architecture and approach that these companies have chosen to address this rather complex set of requirements.

In the process I noticed an interesting phenomenon – when we boiled the specs down to terms that non-architects could understand, we got more constructive feedback from our review committees.  This reminds me of helping a technical writer to document a product – many times the poor writer becomes the usability guinea pig.  It’s a useful exercise – try it some time!

Now we are back to the more serious work of prototyping and refining our definition of meta models and interfaces. 

Expect to see more on this subject in the coming weeks.

^* The CMDB Federation Consortium is composed of participants from BMC, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft.  The consortium was announced in April 2006. After a few months of organizational efforts, we began the architectural work in earnest around October 2006.  The consortium will submit a draft specification for a standards organization (TBD) later this year.