A lot of fluff has been making it into the trade tissues lately about provisioning. "Push the big red button and make the widget go". This is all well and good, but one should be very cognizant of the fact that it's neither that simple nor desirable to just do provisioning. Think of it this way:
You can't spell success without:
Asset Management
Provisioning Catalog
Configuration Management
As it was expressed to me recently, organizations looking to take on Provisioning should learn from what the outsourcers have learned: in order to take over development and support of someone's application, you not only have to know what it is and where it runs, but also what is needed to make it run, how those things are configured and how to make it run.
As such, doing Provisioning without Asset or Configuration Management (or even without connecting to them) is a recipe for disaster. Scaling the provisioning system up without being able to programmatically do Asset or Configuration is simply a non-starter. All your time will be spent working inside Excel to try and track the widgets and ultimately you'll declare failure and go back to doing things the old fashioned way. If you're really unlucky, you'll end up being audited by one of your software vendors, and noone needs that kind of distraction.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
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