Relationship with Asset Management
To properly understand Configuration Management, it is necessary to understand its relationship with Asset
Management. Asset Management keeps track of things of value (assets) to an IT organization, whether that value is
financial, technical, or otherwise, throughout the asset's entire life cycle. That life cycle stretches from the
time the asset is ordered or commissioned to the time when it is retired and disposed.
At various stages in an asset's life cycle, the usage of that asset can cause it to become a part of some larger
object requiring management (for example, a processor is added to a pool of processors allocated to a particular
task) or it can be split into a number of parts at smaller granularity (for example, a physical server is operated
as several virtual servers). Similarly, an ERP system licensed from a vendor might represent one or a handful of
assets to be tracked (for financial or contract management purposes), whereas it can represent hundreds of modules
which must be identified individually. For example, for local customization, problem determination, or maintenance
patch application purposes.
The characteristic of these events is that the asset has been applied to some defined purpose, typically through
any or all of the Solution Development and Integration process, the Release Management process and the Deployment
Management process. At these times, those parts become configuration items (CIs) and are managed by Configuration
Management. Configuration Management focuses on the internal and external relationships of a CI and addresses the
configuration needs of a stage in an asset's life cycle.
Configuration Management in Development
Configuration Management may be performed within the context of either IT development and IT operations. The
description of Configuration Management here addresses only the needs of IT operations. To understand how
Configuration Management works within the context of IT development, see the Rational Unified Process.
Common Data
In practical terms, Asset Management and Configuration Management carry out their activities using data about these
assets and CIs, which is largely common to them both, though each has some attributes and relationships not
significant to the other. Successful implementation of both processes requires joint work on their data models and
clear rules (that is, governance) on which process owns any shared attribute.
Types of CIs
The ITIL® definitions of asset and of configuration item include a range of types of IT elements which can fall
under Configuration Management. Whether an implementation covers all or just some of these types, it is likely that
there will be some process aspects that are dependent on the needs of different component types. Consideration of a
few examples illustrates this:
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Each hardware item is a candidate for both configuration and asset management, though probably at different
levels of granularity. An IT organization will want to keep track of that hardware item throughout its life
cycle from the standpoint of Asset Management. At the same time, when that system is operational, Configuration
Management might be interested in internal hardware components (which are CIs) as well as other CIs that have
some operational relationship to this CI. Hardware items cannot usually be cloned.
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Software components might have no record in the asset register. They can be subject to tight access controls
(for example, to avoid erroneous multiple update during development) and at the same time they can be cloned to
create as many instances as needed within limitations such as license counts. Larger software elements, such as
applications can be both a CI as well as an asset.
The process will also need to take into account the arrangement of the set of internal and external service
providers and establish appropriate interfaces with the Configuration Management process of those service
providers.
