Configuration Management: Approach to IT Service Management Excellence

Configuration Management Delivers:

• Value: 
• Identifying systems or CIs that are duplicative unused, or underutilized, and fixing or retiring them. 
• Operational maturity will always be limited due to lack reference into service, applications and devices relationships success or impact  to deliver business outcomes.
• IT can’t demonstrate a cohesive reference, view or shared vision of “value” due to siloed interpretation and assumption taking the place of a logical managed system of record. 

• Consistency & Resiliency
• Ready reference for what is running where for systems, apps, services and processes are impacted, risk assessment when CI Requirements change
• Reliability and Scalability: 
• More Reliable and less change or incidents that require rolling back a change or replacing the wrong component for lack of accurate reference of which component needed replacing.
• Productivity & Speed:
• Speedier access to Assessment and Communication resources to engage in Technical or Business Reviews due to more reliable reference results in review for Moderate and above change with less change or incidents that require rolling back a change. 
• More successful implementation without issues or impact, because of systemic reference of assessment and communication requirements of what is changing, who is impacted, and when is the best time and process for implementing change. 
• Easier for New Projects, Employees, and Consultants to engage in projects with better reference. 
• Less version or state control collisions during maintenance upgrades due to better change scheduling and ready change state reference.

Configuration Challenges:

1.    Dependence on “organic’ knowledge, continued growth, regulation, and constantly changing owners, groups and “leadership direction”

2.    Cultural resistance to changing how it’s currently done, and confusion and hesitance to try to collaborate on configuration and lose the sense of “control” over the way it’s always been done.

3.    Constantly changing often conflicting silo-ed business directives

BUSINESS CASE FOR CONFIGURATION/INNOVATION:  Amazon Greats 

We must improve innovation, and be more agile, you know, like Amazon Leading Web Services Innovations, where service is easy, predictive, and fast.  Amazon is producing feature-rich bundles of services that dominates the marketplace, redefining what could computing can be or do.  

WHAT do you think enables a rush to deliver highly compelling, turnkey external facing services, growth, with a need for speed, and a hunger for value?  Amazon leads because they know Service Strategy, Service Design, and the importance of Configuration Management as it related to who is my customer, what are they using, and how can I deliver it better, faster, and with machine learning and massive scalability? 

If the goal is Value; Consistency, Reliability; Speed; Productivity; Scalability; and Resiliency How will you manage the current outcomes, without a reliable reference for what is running where, what is in the pipeline, what is retiring that affect our response to our end customer and business needs? 

BUSINESS CASE FOR RESILIENT CONFIGURATION/OPERATIONS:   Grounded Air Travel: The Challenge of Configuration Management

An airline’s product has heavy dependence on IT Operations and service configuration to deal with system automation elements that include passengers, flight portals, airline systems, air travel patterns, weather patterns, aviation rules and passenger, staff, and computer information holding and melding all the data together.  When it works, we rarely notice, the concert of configuration.  Until... 

A week ago, all United Airlines flights were suspended where passengers 2 flights were cancelled, 200 flights were cancelled due to a 2 and a half hour system/automation glitch traced to a system error in the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS). Travelers were offered compensatory travel vouchers.  

This week Delta Airlines left customers stranded across the United States.  With 150 flights delayed, and others impacted by IT hub airport integration with Delta's websites.  Delta was impacted by 2 regulatory configuration changes and struggled to comply with new travel restrictions following President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking travelers (Domestic configuration change 1). Parts of the order were temporarily blocked by judges  (Regional Configuration change 2).

Delta is used to managing complex configuration with their 24/7 Operations Control Center consists of 800 employees in Atlanta GA monitoring key business functions- Strategic Planning, Bridge, Dispatch and making decisions on service delivery, redirection or cancellation based upon data: 

• Views into every flight of 6,000 air flights /day during peak summer months. 
• Proprietary monitoring the health check systems of more than 800 aircraft 
• Flying almost 180 million passengers a year.
• Viewing FAA NextGen Data for surface data from 26 airports 
• Strategic Planning is viewing and making decisions from their own meteorology and weather team and current events on the news 

Purpose & Objective

Identify, control and account for all Service Assets and Configuration Items (CI).

• Security controls restrict access to a need to know basis 
• Allows for simple CI addition, deletion or maintenance
• Allows to view a more complex configuration item relationships (software modules, hierarchic, networked or group relationship. 
• Automatic identification of other affected CIss  when the CI is referenced in an Incident, Change, Known Error, Change or Problem Record.  
• Supports level of details that includes speicfics such as model numbers, version numbers, release or copy numbers, transports if necessary
• Automated linkage of new release versions to prior CI versions
• Clear and scalable ownership by group, not just individual for services for Service Ownership, Subject Matter Experts, Change and Incident Communications reference. 
• Easy search and retrieval to make better decisions with data, targeted by group, geographic or time based CI Risk, Impact, and Event or Change Freeze Schedule Management
• Able view of what is running where, who owns it, and any potential impacts to additions or deletions of CIs in key systems. 

Scope

To cover & maintain Service Assets across the whole life cycle and provide complete inventory of assets establishing relationship. 

• Greater agility and faster problem resolution, communication, and better quality of service with a common record that ties end users to reference services by service group, geographic region, hours of operations, and critical services list. 
• Proper implementation of CM Scope will result in cost reduction and overall improvement of primary and supporting processes.

• Configuration Management (CM) ensures that new services, and current service designs and proposed change is supported by a reliable production build state of known, good & trusted; and doesn’t rely on undocumented "opinions" of impact. 
• Faster service restoration from flexible reference by known relationship be it service, application group or configuration for state of the configuration and relationship related data that supports support and recovery and management of change, incidents, and problems,  be much easier and quicker.
• Detailed knowledge of all critical service configuration reduces impacts induced by human error, allows for unnecessary risk or duplication to be avoided, and enables change freeze scope to be targeted for best results and resource productivity.   
• Enhanced reliability through reliable central system of reference for rapid detection and correction of improper configurations or ownership gaps that adversely impact performance.
• More efficient change management clear record of  prior structure is in order to design changes that do not produce new incompatibilities and/or problems.

Service Asset and Configuration Management Process Approach

1.     1. Plan:  for Transforming Data into managed Information – we tend to be drowning in data, spreadsheets and runbooks, but the problem is, lack of cohesiveness, consistent view, and Configuration Management adds context.

·        Strategy, Policy, Scope, Objectives, Process, Activities, Relationships, and Requirements.  Identify the biggest challenges immediately and address them or set a path around them to produce the first configure asset to success.

• Get started. Focus on singular connection wins that matter, related to the relationships between items. Then repeat for the next and the next. The challenge of not knowing has always existed and has only gotten worse. Fear of complexity or competing views has caused delays. Waiting for a better time to do Configuration Management is counterproductive to starting somewhere small and evolving now.
• Establish a 3-6 month objective detail on progress, results, kpis, cross IT Integration
• Set a 6-12-month review and improve   

2. Configuration Identification:  for clear ownership of CI Information Ownership, relationship, version and identifiers for change management risk and impact identification. 

3. Configuration Control :  Only authorized and identified CIs are accepted under change management control 

4. Status Accounting and Reporting:  maintains legacy/historical and current CI data through the life cycle so it is clear what is running and active where, and who owns it. 

·        CI States are maintained through servicedesk, change, problem, and incident manage process. 

·        States include ordered, Received, Under Test, Under Repair, Retired, or Disposal

5. Verification and Audit:  Review and audit to verify physical existence, ownership, relationship accuracy in the CMDB.