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Configuration Management - relations to other processes


In my previous articles I described activities performed within the Configuration Management (CM). Now we shall provide you with some information on how CM relates to other processes and how it interacts with them.

As you remember from my other CM articles the CMDB owned by the CM is a basic and most capacious source of information about the client system environment as well as relations between existing CI's.

From the ITIL perspective the CM with the CMDB is the central part of all other processes and it influences them (see the fig.1).





fig.1 – [the close relation between CM and other processes on the way searching for the final solution]



Relation to Incident Management

Let's get a bit deeper into the subject: When the incident is noticed by the Incident Management (IM) the CMDB is expected to be up-to-date and ready for the IM team member who tends to search the CMDB in order to localize the description of CI's and their relations that are impacted by the Incident. The localization of those faulty CI's is crucial step before a temporary workaround or the permanent solution could be made. A quick identification of faulty CI's could lead to he quick workaround implementation and concludes with a quick restoration of the service. In the meantime the CI's status in the CMDB should be updated.

Relation to Problem Management

The knowledge gathered thanks to the detailed description of CI's is even more desirable in the Problem Management (PM) process when the deep analysis of the problem is performed: The relation between faulty CI's is a field of investigation. The CMDB status of the CI again just like in previously mentioned IM, should be updated when the final solution is made and the Change Management and Release Management is launched to perform the successful update on the live environment.

Relation to Capacity Management & Availability Management

Other processes like the Capacity Management, Availability Management also use the information gathered in CMDB in order to asses the current state of the system and future need of resizing or exchanging the some number of CI's.

Relation to Service Level Management

The Service Level Management which is responsible for the SLA construction and formal documents release has to take into consideration CI's limitations influencing the whole system abilities so that the SLA conditions have to be written adequately.


Added: 2008-07-13