Why use Configuration Management?
Gartner says that an average of 80 percent of mission-critical application service downtime is directly caused by people or process failures. The other 20 percent is caused by technology failure, environmental failure or a disaster. Most of us in IT Services are very much aware of high profile downtime incidents in the last year caused to some degree by changes to our production configuration. In yesterday’s Miami Matters announcement of our new AVP of Enterprise Operations, stabilizing our core operational services was called a “critical need” and his primary charge.
The success of our new strategic imperative Stabilize The Core will depend first and foremost, on our ability to improve our Service Asset Configuration Management (SACM) decisions and processes. In yesterday’s communication, we defined What a Configuration Item (CI) is. This communication will address Why we need to get better at identifying, controlling and maintaining our CIs throughout their lifecycle.
You Shouldn’t Change What You Don’t Know
Unintended consequences such as service outages and lost data can often be traced to something the requester and/or implementer of a change didn’t know about our production configuration, or something about our configuration that was incorrect or out of date. Better SACM is about institutionalizing what we know about our configuration in a consistent manner in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) using a Configuration Management System (CMS) enabling more mature CM processes.
Better, Faster, Cheaper
Changes can be performed more efficiently and effectively by maintaining an accurate, complete and accessible understanding of all of the CIs involved in or impacted by changes we make and the dependencies between them. If we are diligent about maintaining the integrity of the knowledge of our CIs and their relationships in a CMDB using a CMS, it won’t require a major research effort to feel good about making a change.
What Happened?
SACM is not a panacea and won’t result in 100% uptime. In the event that a change to our configuration fails or a major incident occurs, we need the ability to isolate the cause and return our configuration to a functional state or resolve the incident as quickly as possible. Stability can be more of a perception to those who depend on it than a reality to those charged with providing it. Better SACM can dramatically enhance both the perception and reality of the stability of our core services through more efficient resolution of failed changes and major incidents. This can be accomplished through more accurate, complete and accessible information about the past, present and future state of our services and CIs.
Who did that?
The ultimate self-inflicted major incident or failed change to a service or CI is caused by someone or something without proper authorization. Better SACM means ensuring that the right CIs are changed by the right people.
There are many more reasons for improving our SACM. We have outlined the primary motivation behind our SACM maturity efforts and hope you have a better understanding of why SACM is important to all of us. Feel free to contact any member of the SACM process improvement team with questions or more information: