{"id":425,"date":"2014-10-15T09:43:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T13:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/?p=425"},"modified":"2014-10-15T09:44:30","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T13:44:30","slug":"sacm-and-the-change-implementer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/?p=425","title":{"rendered":"SACM and the Change Implementer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So you are someone who implements changes in one or more of our computing services and you are saying to yourself &#8220;what does Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) do for me?&#8221; \u00a0A good and valid question which we will attempt to answer now.<\/p>\n<p>First things first. \u00a0What is SACM? \u00a0In 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\u200b,\u200b which includes historical, present, future values of various attributes\u200b,\u200b as well as the relationships (parent\/child, co-requisites, dependencies, etc.) of Configuration Items (CIs) to each other. \u00a0This process provides accountability, integrity, and protection of services by ensuring that only authorized changes are made and those changes are logged. \u00a0It also helps plan changes by providing easier determinations of all the services a change might affect. \u00a0In the event of a disruption of service this information can also provide useful diagnosis and root cause analysis through the change logs.<\/p>\n<p>SACM is directly linked to Change Management. \u00a0In fact\u200b,\u200b one of the policy goals of Change Management at Miami is that all changes are linked to one or more Configuration Items. \u00a0In other words\u200b,\u200b if you can&#8217;t identify at least one CI in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to link a change to, you\u200b can&#8217;t submit the request for the change. \u00a0A 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.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0Over the long term the benefits outweigh this extra work by providing us with several advantages. \u00a0A well designed and populated CMDB can:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Increase accuracy of risk assessment for changes<\/li>\n<li>Provide accurate historical configuration analysis<\/li>\n<li>Aid in the diagnosis and root cause analysis of incidents\u200b<\/li>\n<li>Make planning communications for incidents and planned service disruptions much easier, and eventually move towards more automation<\/li>\n<li>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<\/li>\n<li>Provide the gateway for IT Services to become better at proactive administration of our services and begin minimizing our frequent reactive approach<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0This lets you know what services may need tested after the change is made and which services may have incidents due to a failed change. \u00a0In general the Change Implementer would also be responsible for manually updating the Configuration Items when the change is done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So you are someone who implements changes in one or more of our computing services and you are saying to yourself &#8220;what does Service Asset [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-we-work","tag-service-excellence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/itservices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}