I might have exactly the wrong path here, but I think it's
>under the dynamics menu
>Effects > Shatter.
This will generate a specified, randomly shaped, set of pieces. They can even be set to be automatically effected by each other, etc, from the creation options. Two things, though; depending on your machine, the pieces may take a while to create, and enabling inter-piece collisions before the pieces are a certain distance apart can be slow because of proximity.

I reccomend experimenting.

Maya actually has an additional tutorial about this buried in the help files.... Try searching under 'shatter'