Most organisations can have an effective CMS (configuration management system) by just using what they already have in place in their organisations, writes Johann Botha, a service management and governance consultant.
This basic realisation that all the underlying data and much information about the IT provider’s environment and services provided is behind the drive of companies like Microsoft’s System Centre, and the new addition to the suite: Service Manager.
Users all know that the reason for the configuration management process is to be able to make better decisions in an IT environment, and specifically to understand the risks involved in changing the IT landscape. Configuration management achieves this by helping an IT service provider to understand relationships between configuration items (CIs).
These relationships are mostly achieved by understanding the attributes of CIs and sometimes the status of the CI and by manage the CIs under change control.
So let’s have a look at what users need to have a meaningful CMS:
* Information about hardware and software and how they are configured (SCCM will do this in the MS space).
* Information about users and the services they access (AD can do this if properly configured).
* Relationship between the above CIs and incidents, problems and changes (the new Service Manager will provide this functionality – and SCOM will automate the logging of incidents and problems based on pre-defined rules).
* Customers and SLAs (this can be configured in Service Manager when prioritisation and escalation is defined).
What more do an organisation need for an effective CMS? Most probably, a bit of time and effort is required to understand organisational needs and to identify what is meaningful to the organisation to be clarified as configuration items, defining some rules and configuring Service Manager.
Botha has been telling students and customers for a number of years that they have all the data already in place to do configuration management; all they need is an integration and presentation layer.
People may argue that the environment is more complex and needs a more complex solution. It may be true, but do they have a working solution defined that seamlessly integrate system management tools, workflow engines and service management processes and concepts, now, here today and usable? Microsoft have achieved this.
There are, however, a few things Botha don’t like or agree with about the Microsoft approach (like the idea of change workflow that can easily negate the CAB) but everyone is entitled to their opinion – as a whole, Botha thinks MS have a winner here.