My Certified Technical Architect Series - Week 2

[Marcos Kassak]

Welcome to the week 2! Let's get started:

Within the program, there are two recognitions named "Star of the Week" and "Super Contributor". The first one was awarded to Yiqi Lin for her outstanding presentation, which went far beyond expectations, showcasing a live instance with SPM containing goals and a roadmap with deliverables.

The super contributor award goes to the person who went the extra mile in the program, and Chris Nanda deserved it! Thanks for sharing insights on the discussion board and being able to provide comprehensive feedback in peer reviews (from which I have learned a lot).

Also special thanks to Bhargava Kandlakunta for leading our group for this week’s presentation with ease!

The goal was to learn more about:

• Running workshops
• Articulating the Value of the Platform
• CMDB/CSDM

Even though I am not an expert in CMDB/CSDM it felt really good being able to watch and understand other people talking about it in different ways and using real-life examples - not to mention that CSDM 5.0 is on its way! (been time).

About some of my notes and lessons learned for this week:

• Practice presenting with the correct screen (presenter view), ensuring your notes are ready.
• Foundation data (Users, Groups, Locations, Departments, Company, Cost Center…) are often forgotten in an implementation; this is what also fuels the CMDB. So, give it a proper plan to have this data clean and updated.
• CMDB and CSDM should be given higher priority within every company… The roadmap should be planned with the right phases like crawl, walk, run, and fly.
• You can also have a CMDB in place, but without governance and proper care - it will fall apart.
• As said by our friend and presenter of the week: “CMDB is the heart ServiceNow like heart pumps blood to all parts of the body, CMDB pumps data to all modules within ServiceNow". So you need to make sure that your data model is accurate, normalized, and fits all applications.
• When running workshops, understand your audience. Introduce the concepts to the appropriate people using language they can understand.
• Share the agenda, along with any reference documents, 3-4 days in advance.
• As an architect you need to know how to articulate the value of the platform and leverage what you have ready to do so - Now Create, Resource Center, Partner Enablement... also always refer to the Capability Map asset to be aware of the roadmap and implementation plans.

All right, that's it for this week... we had so much content inside but I have tried to bring up some of the important topics.

On to the next one! 🫡

Linkedin Article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-cta-series-week-2-marcos-vin%2525C3%2525ADcius-kassak-23ukf/?track...

[Jim Garrett]

Well said!

Not nearly as "glittery" as AI - but the data model and the conformance to maximum results with minimum effort - the health and well being of the CMDB is important to IT and ITSM but even more essential in specific cases to AI.

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Current Architectural projects seem to be lofty in goals of total instantaneous knowledge and recall (fun to think of) - but seldom have full circuit joy if not underpinned by the entities, references and relationships integral to the wisdom and recall.

Thanks for sharing!