Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's Why is configuration management important?
Its been a while since we picked up the thread on Configuration Management and really of all of the ITIL disciplines, this is one where I firmly believe that the SME has a significant advantage over larger organisations. Why is that? Well configuration managements two biggest enemies are scale and people. I will explain why but firstly lets recap on what Configuration Management is, it purpose and how it differs from Asset Management.
Config’ Management is about understanding you IT estate whilst Asset Management is purely a list of everything you own. Most IT things that you own can be referred to as CI’s or “Configuration Items”. Common examples are PC’s, printers, network routers, servers etc but it also extends to documents such as user guides, SLA’s and support contracts. Anything that makes up your computer estate and “could” change is part of your CI estate. Once we have identified what CI’s are important to us (and for every business this is different) we need to record them somewhere. This place is normally referred to as the Configuration Database (or the CMDB ). Now this does not need to be a single database, if fact it can be a mixture of different pots of information in different formats, but in its collective form a CMDB is born. Finally the CMDB makes links to each CI where they touch.
For example a system might be made up of the following:
1) A PC
2) A Printer
3) A connection to the internet via a wireless
4) A set of software
5) A set of user manuals
6) A support contract
Now once again, with our rudimentary CMDB this could a list of manual diagrams or reference tables. The important thing is that everything is connected where possible.
Now we have a good understanding of our estate we can start to use the information for our benefit. Areas such as system failures, reviewing service and approaching system upgrades all benefit from a good CMDB (and that will be the topic of the next chapter of this blog) but finally let answer my original question. Why do SME’s have the advantage? Well as I indicated at the start of this subject it really comes down to two things:
Scale: Let’s take a typical support centre for a large organisation. One main head office (1000 people), a number of satellite offices (4 sites with 30 people in each site) plus a field based sales team (100 people with laptops). This is supported by approx 30 different systems hosted on 25 different servers, 40 support contracts……etc etc etc. Where would you start with your CMDB and would you even want to start with the dependencies?
People: Even if you do get your CMDB in place, this is where it starts to go wrong. Mrs Jones is on maternity leave and Miss Smith thinks that Mrs Jones laptop is better than hers so they agree to swap whilst she is off on maternity leave. Whilst this is going on, Ted in accounts finds a little program that will help him with his tax calculations. He knows someone in the desktop team who installs it without a call to the service desk and now we have an unsupported piece of software which is probably dependent on data help on a central file store. People cause information in the CMDB to become corrupted. Because of the reduced size of the IT estate in SME’s you have such a huge advantage over larger organisation.
22nd June 2009