Configuration Management Software for Best Practices
Organizations must have the ability to respond to customer and business requests almost immediately in today’s competitive market. As we are exposed to instantaneous innovation in our personal lives with fairly sophisticated technical tools, we expect even more in our professional environments. A large amount of work relies heavily on an organization’s infrastructure, as such information technology plays an important role in how a company communicates, develops, and delivers services. As an organization develops long-term strategies, it is essential to understand the business value of information technology.
While configuration management is required in the ISO 20000 standard and in the CMMI framework as it relates to configuration items, configuration management is an important component of best practice frameworks. Beginning with understanding what assets are considered configuration items – to their relationship and impact with other IT assets, configuration management is a fundamental principle to maintaining serviceability at the lowest cost. Deciding how to manage your configuration items is vital; the right solution can reduce the time spent on data entry and manual updates and help prevent errors.
Effective configuration management considers the following:
- How do we define assets as configuration items and what type of database will we use to manage CI information?
- How are configuration items affected by changes?
- What is the relationship between IT assets and how can we more effectively manage our infrastructure?
- What will our future IT needs be as we continue to grow and how is spending impacted?
- What purchase orders need to be approved and what should be invoiced?
- How do we make better decisions about our IT purchases to reduce costs and increase capacity?
- How do we maintain availability and prevent major issues to ensure business continuity?
- What methods should we implement to perform configuration audits?
ITG’s CENTRE software addresses these areas of concern and can not only be integrated with our consulting solution to help manage your existing project more efficiently, but can provide your organization an effective way to manage your configuration items in a single intuitive portal based on your requirements.
CENTRE’s Configuration Management module helps to:
- Provide a database to register and manage systems, hardware, software, and virtual configuration items
- Maintain CI information including relationships, life cycle, and costs
- Define user roles to maintain security of CIs
- Facilitate baselines and version history of configuration items
- Track relationships between configuration items and contract assets
- Manage relationship with incident, problem, and change management
- Provide reports for verification, financial and performance information
If your organization needs a solution to manage your configuration items or is considering implementing ISO 20000-1:2011 or CMMI, ITG can work with you to streamline your implementation. Incorporating CENTRE’s configuration management module with our consulting services allows you to add speed and definition to managing your configuration items without having to decide on what method to use. Importance can shift to focus your efforts on areas of significance, providing a faster implementation with more control, less paperwork, and lower costs for maintenance.
Please contact us today to learn about how CENTRE can help provide you with a configuration management solution.