Configuration management
[3][4][5] CM applied over the life cycle of a system provides visibility and control of its performance, functional, and physical attributes.
CM verifies that a system performs as intended, and is identified and documented in sufficient detail to support its projected life cycle.
CM verifies that changes are carried out as prescribed and that documentation of items and systems reflects their true configuration.
For this reason, engineers, contractors, and management are frequently forced to develop documentation reflecting the actual status of the item before they can proceed with a change.
During system development, CM allows program management to track requirements throughout the life-cycle through acceptance and operations and maintenance.
As changes inevitably occur in the requirements and design, they must be approved and documented, creating an accurate record of the system status.
The key difference between CM and AM is that the former does not manage the financial accounting aspect but on service that the system supports or in other words, that the later (AM) is trying to realize value from an IT asset.
Members of an organization interested in applying a standard change-management process will employ these disciplines as policies and procedures for establishing baselines, manage and control change, and monitor and assess the effectiveness and correctness of progress.
The SCM process further defines the need to trace changes, and the ability to verify that the final delivered software has all of the planned enhancements that are supposed to be included in the release.
Configuration Management (CM) is an ITIL-specific ITSM process that tracks all of the individual CIs in an IT system which may be as simple as a single server, or as complex as the entire IT department.
Understanding how near the end of their life each of these components is has been a major undertaking involving labor-intensive record keeping until recent developments in software.
Availability of accurate and timely data is essential in order for CM to provide operational value and a lack of this can often be a limiting factor.
The consumers of this data have grown more numerous and complex with the growth of programs offered by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
configuration management has been applied to large construction projects which can often be very complex and have a huge number of details and changes that need to be documented.
One such application, CCSNet, was tested in a case study funded by the Federal Transportation Administration (FTA) in which the efficacy of configuration management was measured through comparing the approximately 80% complete construction of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Agency (LACMTA) first and second segments of the Red Line, a $5.3 billion rail construction project.
