Identifying, controlling, and tracking all versions of hardware, software, documentation, processes, procedures, and all other components of the IT environment under the control of change management
prevent unauthorized software usage through ebc Cluster ministries,
improved management of software licences and software and hardware peripherals added to leased personal computers (and not included in leased costs),
facilitate performance of change and release management tasks by providing information that helps these processes determine the impacts (that is, hardware requirements and software conflicts) associated with making changes in the IT environment,
facilitate the resolution of problems and incidents by incident and problem management and the service desk when these processes utilize the CMDB as a research tool,
Most costs are paid through an annual appropriation to the ebcIT Division through the Ministry of Labour as negotiated during the annual government-wide fiscal budgeting process,
configuration management is limited to the production environment. Software development maintains its own methodology and environment for logging, tracking, and controlling software.
the Configuration Coordinator needs to work closely with software development to determine how a specific application is defined as a CI in the CMDB (for example, rather than tracking each individual software module in the CMDB, a decision should be made to track all of the related modules as a "release" and assign it a release number, title, and so on). This simplifies one important tracking element of configuration management and can help prevent the political battles that can arise if software development perceives the Configuration Coordinator as "interfering" with business.
network incidents are managed by the Ontario Government's Integrated Network Provider - EDS through their Service Desk. Network CIs such as routers, gateways, etc should be retained in a CMDB administered by EDS
depending on the granularity of items maintained in the CMDB, accurate updating of the CMDB may require Discovery tools to query the infrastructure for servers and desktops. Discovery tools often miss (or double count) roaming devices such as laptops (which may not be connected or may be connected at multiple locations over a set time period).
Configuration management planning. - planning and defining the scope, objectives, policies, procedures, and the organizational and technical context for configuration management,
Configuration identification - selecting and identifying the configuration structures for all the infrastructure's configuration items, their "owner," their interrelationships, and configuration documentation. It includes allocating identifiers for configuration items and their versions,
Configuration control - ensuring that only authorized and identifiable configuration items are accepted and recorded from receipt to disposal. It ensures that no CI is added, modified, replaced, or removed without appropriate controlling documentation, such as an approved change request, or updated specification.
Configuration status accounting. This is the reporting of all current and historical data concerned with each CI throughout its life cycle. It makes their records traceable, for example, by enabling the tracking of the status of a CI through such states as development, test, live, and withdrawn.
Configuration verification and audit - reviews and audits that verify the physical existence of configuration items and check that they are correctly recorded in the CMDB, and ensure that only authorized items are used in the IT environment.
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