Managing Asset and Service Changes

Summary

Managing changes to assets and services is vital, including changes to hardware, software, equipment being tracked as a major value-producing asset, documentation, procedures, and processes. 

Change Management is a widely used term. It can represent scope change management in the context of project and program scope. It can represent organizational change as well (often the term change leadership is used for that to avoid confusion). And it can also represent changes to software, technical infrastructure, and other assets and services. This last definition is the focus of this best practice.

Thanks to ITIL, there is increasing standardization of IT Service Management, including configuration and change management. Configuration management refers to the versions, updates, and other information about all IT infrastructure components in the organization. Configuration changes are historically tracked in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which in practice is rarely a single database per se, but a network of related configuration information and relationships from multiple sources.

Organizations are now evolving to the concept of a Configuration Management System (CMS) and Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). The CMS integrates configuration information about various infrastructure components from multiple CMDBs, while the SKMS provides business information about services, such as business process information, service performance feedback, service level agreements, and more.