So you are someone who implements changes in one or more of our computing services and you are saying to yourself “what does Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) do for me?” A good and valid question which we will attempt to answer now.
First things first. What is SACM? In the simplest terms SACM is a process used to identify, control, track, and audit assets (e.g. physical hardware, software services, etc.) and the configuration of those items, which includes historical, present, future values of various attributes, as well as the relationships (parent/child, co-requisites, dependencies, etc.) of Configuration Items (CIs) to each other. This process provides accountability, integrity, and protection of services by ensuring that only authorized changes are made and those changes are logged. It also helps plan changes by providing easier determinations of all the services a change might affect. In the event of a disruption of service this information can also provide useful diagnosis and root cause analysis through the change logs.
SACM is directly linked to Change Management. In fact, one of the policy goals of Change Management at Miami is that all changes are linked to one or more Configuration Items. In other words, if you can’t identify at least one CI in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to link a change to, you can’t submit the request for the change. A change may result in something as simple as a log of the change within the CI or it may involve changing one or more attributes of one or more CI in the CMDB.
To be perfectly direct, this will result in a bit more overhead, especially in the beginning as we are building up the Configuration Management information. Over the long term the benefits outweigh this extra work by providing us with several advantages. A well designed and populated CMDB can:
- Increase accuracy of risk assessment for changes
- Provide accurate historical configuration analysis
- Aid in the diagnosis and root cause analysis of incidents
- Make planning communications for incidents and planned service disruptions much easier, and eventually move towards more automation
- Improve the ability for someone unfamiliar with a service to step in and help out when the people who normally administer the service are unavailable
- Provide the gateway for IT Services to become better at proactive administration of our services and begin minimizing our frequent reactive approach
All of these benefits can be directly related to three of the five activity streams IT Services is concentrating on (Stabilize the Core, Service Excellence, and Continuous Improvement).
For the Change Implementer SACM provides a more complete description of the services and their dependencies, allowing you to identify everything that may be affected by a change you are making. This lets you know what services may need tested after the change is made and which services may have incidents due to a failed change. In general the Change Implementer would also be responsible for manually updating the Configuration Items when the change is done.