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August 15, 2005

The Conceptual Basis of Configuration Management Data

Technology functionality offers business tremendous capability, but for functionality to be meaningful it must be translated into utility.

For this reason, the most important view of IT asset items is of their configurations -- that is, of the organization of assets as resources. Business awareness of configurations powers managed utilization that proves to be effective instead of just continuous or diligent.

Said that way, the role of data about item configurations is evident. In particular, what is important is data about the business management of the configurations.

The high level business view on IT assets revolves around the main business benefits associated with what they offer to business capabilities -- namely:
- capacity, security and agility.

However, the day-to-day management of the IT item configurations is more directly involved with three key business constraints on those benefits:
- ownership, control and alignment.

These constraints are just one set of several major groups of things that change and that therefore call for management attention in order to calibrate and assure optimal utilization of IT's functionality.

Before we look at an illustration of these changes and how business awareness affects them, let's recap what configuration management data involves in this discussion.

- Configuration: a definition of how asset items are deployed as resources

- Management: specify, approve, implement, support, and modify the configurations

- Data: recorded observations about the management

With that understanding, the illustrations below proceed from the issue of managing against key constraints, down to the relevant level of data about managing configurations.

The illustrations show why information about the management efforts is tantamount to business intelligence about the configurations.

First, the overview, detailing the above comments on business awareness:

Following on that set of business issues is a set of management performance issues, shown below. Business information (matrix at top) about the proposed value of IT deployments must be related to information (cube at bottom) about how deployments are actually being managed. Although the issues are typical for all companies, the information (to be determined) will be unique to each company and will change over time.

A key feature of this overall perspective is that it distinguishes data describing the configurations from data describing their management. While both kinds of data are necessary, understanding utilization requires a description of the management phenomena that account for why IT is impacting the business as it actually does. With that understanding, managers can better decide what to do about configurations, when to do it, and why.

(For a discussion on the Resource Status Information view in configuration management, see the article Operations Intelligence - The Business Logic of the CMDB here in the Archestra collection.)

In summary: the IT impacts on the business are the result of management decisions. Management decisions create resources from IT assets in the form of configurations, and deploy those resources into the operational environment of business objectives. Our illustrations here point out the type of information about management that makes up a huge portion of the "business intelligence" needed for decision-support to direct the assignment, leveraging and optimization of the resources.

Bringing this back into the business management context, companies find configuration management significantly and even strategically influencing planning. In the illustration below, this influence is traced around a closed loop of business enablement typified by enterprise architecture's extension into configuration management.

The understanding and management of events calls for the company to be able to describe events in terms of the items and circumstances that they involve. Why?

The assumption is that everything happens -- whether intentional or not -- occurs because some part of the business is trying to make something happen. Events are effects, so the problem is to understand what events mean when they happen (impacts), and to exert some control over them (causes). To do this, the configuration of the infrastructure is constantly checked to determine how events (and their meaning) relate to (a.) the infrastructure's capacity vs. demand, and (b.) the infrastructure's integrity versus demand. The main objective is to develop manageability of the events. That requires sophisticated ways of describing events, especially in terms of what "items" are involved in the occurrence of an event -- in other words, the collection of item definitions that allows analysis of the infrastructure. So, for example, the analysis drives decisions about whether capacity and integrity need to be addressed through initiatives or problem resolutions (i.e. repairs) regarding development and/or security.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 15, 2005 8:56 PM

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