Configuration management is important - and if you implement ITIL or CMMI you know that. For everyone else, it's about knowing what you have, where it is, what it does, what impacts it has if it goes wrong or changes, when it was last checked, who owns it, how is it changing and so on. It's hard to see how anyone in IT could do their job without configuration management - although it is often informal and inside some key "change management" person's head. Which is, on the whole, pretty risky.

The important things to remember are that configuration management is about more than just change management; and about more than just managing software development. It is about managing anything seen as important to delivering a business service; and it's about the relationships between things involved in delivering these business services.

If you want to know more, David Cuthbartson of the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group, who uses configuration management to manage physical assets in data centres, is giving a series of webcasts on BrightTALK, accessed through the BCS-CMSG LinkedIn group. An Introduction to Configuation Management is already available (the live webcast was viewed from Poland, Czech republic, India, USA and other countries) and Configuration Management in the Data Centre is being given on Feb 28th at 1pm UK time - there is an opportunity to ask questions during the live presentations.

Recommended viewing!