We use many two-letter abbreviations and three-letter abbreviations in IT Services (I just used one there).

CI is a two-letter abbreviation that you’ll be hearing much more about in the weeks leading up to the roll-out of Service Excellence in Team Dynamix Release 2. You might already be familiar with using the two-letter abbreviation of CI as shorthand for continual improvement or continuous integration.

The glossary on the Service Excellence site defines a CI as a configuration item. 

Configuration items are anything that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service.

Configuration items are under the control of change management; they are the things that change management actually changes. A CI might be an application, a piece of infrastructure, another IT service, a facility, a documented process or even a person.

If change management is changing the configuration items, then how do you make one in the first place? Or retire one once it is no longer useful? Where are configuration items recorded, stored, and maintained? Is there a process that spells all of this out for us that we could adopt? Stay tuned for much more information about the Service Asset and Configuration Management process.