NSS Consulting has been promoting configuration management to its customers for the last five years, with many customers shying away from tackling these types of projects, either due to lack of understanding or the capability to resource such projects.
Marius Prinsloo, Certified Process and Configuration Management analyst at NSS, believes the confusion is largely due to the question of ownership of the two different disciplines, since asset management is owned/used by finance, and IT configuration management is largely owned and used by IT (configuration management and change management).
IT asset management is a discipline primarily focused only on the financial aspects of all IT equipment purchased in an organisation. It concerns itself with issues that are focused on the purchase price, date of purchase, warranty, etc.
IT configuration management is basically evolved IT asset management, since it would include IT asset management information but would also include the interrelationships and dependencies between the various IT assets/components making up a specific IT service.
It should be noted that financial information like price, date of purchase, warranty, etc, are also important to IT since they would need to know these variables when agreeing service level agreements with their customers. It is also important to know the financial information when these components are to be serviced or maintained, whether there are still warrantees applicable, in order to avoid having it repaired at extra costs to the organisation at a different vendor.
Due to the fact that IT configuration management includes the relationships and interdependencies of IT components, it is clear that this cannot be achieved in a typically static IT asset management register. A lot a of time and effort is needed to accurately identify these relationships; it is therefore important to keep the information in a dynamic IT configuration management tool, which has both the capability to retain the item records and dependencies as well as the functionality to dynamically keep the records/items updated whenever a change to the infrastructure has been made.
A key benefit of effective IT configuration management is the value it adds to the other disciplines/processes within the IT environment. The change management process is enhanced by the fact that they can perform accurate impact assessments prior to affecting any change within the environment, which would ensure less impact on the organisation with reduction on the amount of time and money spent on rework.
Disaster recovery planning could be done much more accurately since the organisation would be in a position to know exactly where, what and how much of a specific IT component would have to be restored in the event of a disaster. Help-desk would be able to resolve calls much more effectively if they are in position to determine which users are all affected by the same failed IT component (router for example).
From the above it should be clear that traditional IT asset management can not and never will be able to provide the required information as provided by IT configuration management.
Share
