University taps ITIL to build open source CMDB

Brigham Young University uses best practices to centralize and share data internally and with parent organization

By Denise Dubie, Network World, 04/19/07

 Start a discussion    Print article

 Comments (1)    Print article

Faced with an overhaul to its IT service management strategy, the IT team at Brigham Young University decided to start at the bottom.

"We needed to build a better foundation for our IT departments," says Neil Jon Harrington, director of data-center facilities operations for the Office of IT at BYU.

In 2002 BYU built a new data center, and in 2003, the Provo, Utah, university merged operations teams with its parent organization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The convergence of the two organizations promised to maximize resources among the like-minded groups, but also posed a challenge to those heading up the initiative. The groups wanted to share data across the university campus and affiliated sites, but IT wasn't sure how to bring the disparate data stored on various systems together -- and then enable centralized and role-based access to the data from different locations.

"It's important for the organizations to share information, but when you are faced with everything from Microsoft Access to spreadsheets to Post-It notes and napkins as part of your information management system, the idea of finding a common method seems daunting," Harrington says.

One staff member had worked with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in a previous position and pointed Harrington to the best-practices framework as a place to start solving their data management and sharing problem.

"I was negative going into ITIL because in my experience, I had yet to see anything good come out of something so seemingly bureaucratic. It looked to me like a big fat book of red tape," Harrington says. "I can't say it was my personal decision, but it was very sensible, reasonable and covered many aspects of what we needed to do. And I was very pleasantly surprised and am still quite satisfied with that choice."

How ITIL fit

Specifically, Harrington found ITIL's best practices around incident, problem, change and configuration management would address the issue of how to make two operations teams act as one.

Featured Whitepapers

About Us | Contact Us | Advertising Info | Terms of Service/Privacy

Copyright, 2006-2007 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.