It’s been 7 days since I left Fusion 11 in Washington DC and I am nearly caught up on everything or should I say, on everything that I will catch up on. Today I posted the Incident Escalation Cost Calculator which was received by everyone in my session Wednesday morning as well as I could have hoped. I also was asked for a Change Impact Cost Calculator so…I guess I have more work to do now.  I look forward to getting feedback from everyone who uses these free utilities so they can grow and mature into vital tools for everyone. Did I mention it’s free?

The conference was once again a special event where we could spend some quality time with friends and catch up on vendor products and services. This year in particular, it was great to have the HDI crowd amongst our itSMF USA brethren. It really added a new dimension and perspective to what we do. I met some new folks that I hope to eventually call friends. They came from all over the US, United Kingdom, Australia and my newest service management friends Ariel & Gonzalo from InvGate, a service management software product company based Argentina.

One of the highlights for me was without question the #SISLunch on Tuesday. For those unfamiliar with what #SISLunch is, it is an effort I took on for the conference, as a follow-up to Glenn’s blog post, to bring together thought leaders in the Configuration Management space to discuss where we as an industry should take the future of CMDB. The reason it was the highlight of course was the simple fact that surrounding yourself with world class brain power and focusing on your area of specialty is not something that you can pull off very often. Being at the table with the likes of Gene Kim, Charles Betz, Glenn O’Donnell, Ivanka Menken was amazing and inspiring. In addition to these great individuals, others who also provided great input were Ariel Gesto, Gonzalo Sainz Trapaga, Thorsten Manthey, Wayne Hartzler and John Shireling (I apologize if I missed anyone). Thank you all for participating and helping us take the first step towards the future CMDB. Be on the lookout for #SISLunch gatherings and the vehicle that Glenn & I will make available for all of us to use as our central discussion area.

A quick recap of the lunch notes is below as well as some background information that set the basis for the #SISLunch. If you were not at the #SISLunch but would like to get involved in future discussions, please contact me and I will be sure to bring you into the discussion.

• What is #SISLunch?  #SISLunch is the Twitter hashtag used during the Fusion 11 conference to communicate with everyone interested in the lunch meeting. For now, I intend to continue to use this hashtag so as to reach out to people more broadly.
• What does SIS stand for? SIS stands for Service Information System. It is an acronym that resulted from research and feedback gathered by Glenn O’Donnell after his blog posting regarding “New CMDB”.
• Is #SISlunch vendor specific? NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT!! The intention is to be technology and vendor agnostic. Ideally, we will be able to move the vendors to adopt the vision so as to enable corporations to more easily deploy a Configuration Management solution.

#SISLunch Notes:

• Using “C” in the name representing “Configuration” is not accurate because the solution is much more than just about the “configuration” of devices and/or software.
• SKMS already has too much baggage so we can’t use that as a replacement name for CMDB.
• What are the real pain points that we are trying to solve?
• Can we really move forward with the general concept while people still have a hard time defining and can’t come to agreement on what the definition of a service is? Is it sufficient to say that a Service is simply an “arbitrary logical construct”?
• We need to design the structure in a way that it captures the “language of the community”.
• If we replace “C” with “S” should we call things “Service Items” instead of “Configuration Items”?
• While discussing what the data subjects might/should be, we began to look into the concept of using a Bill of Materials sort of parallel to help frame the ideas. Also brought up along this line was to use Bill of Resources instead. The thought behind using this “manufacturing” parallel was that IT manufactures “transactions”.

So, keep an eye out for the next #SISLunch event coming to a virtual forum near you. Follow me on Twitter @CarlosCasanova and create a Twitter stream for #SISLunch to stay up to speed on the coming events.