Implementation People

[Harvey]

I'm just full of questions today...

I have heard some discussion on how to best assign people to different ITIL related roles. I have also heard that questions like this come up in the higher level ITIL exams. For example, "What are some implications of the Incident and Problem manager being the same person? In what situations is this the better way to do things?" Or similarly, with Change Manager and Release Manager.

Is there any place I can read opinions about suggestions on how to assign resources?

I am especially curious about Asset Management and Configuration Management roles.

[mcardinal]

Harvey,

I remember this question from the Master's Exam. I took the role descriptions for each process and compared them to see overlaps or redundancies. This worked pretty well, but there may be other approaches.

Now that I am working in Asset Managmenet, I too would be interested in people's opinions on the Asset to Config role comparisons. I am struggling at my own company to find consistency on these two disciplines.

Michael

[rjp]

Hi

More to mcardinal's question than Harvey's...

I would emphasis the difference between financial and operational management, with asset management being more concerned with financial management and configuration management being more concerned with operation data on the infrastructure.

I have always felt that people recoil from configuration management because it looks too big when faced with a really complex IT infrastructure. But I've also always seen CM as answering basic operational questions: What it used for?, Who can touch it? Why, When and with whose approval? That is, as an operational control discipline - not even as an operational discipline per se. I've never seen CM as an alternative way of systems and network groups doing their jobs for example, and I never thought of a CMDB as a complete map of the IT terrain - which would be useless because a map as detailed as the terrain doesn't offer any analytical advantage. CM abstracts management information from the infrastructure and provides a control function for that information. Which is not that hard in the end.

Asset management on the other hand isn't so concerned with operational questions, but more cost based issues.

Though I think there is some overlap - ie., both would be concerned with life-cycle status on a CI - things like how long before this bit of equipment is due for pasture. But for different reasons - Asset management would be tracking depreciation and looking to factor replacement into budgets, while Configuration management would be looking to capture and record changes to operational information - especially things like changes to CI to service dependencies on replacement - impact on services of decommissioning etc.

Perhaps 'asset management' should remain 'outside' IT, as a non-technical business activity, but which relies on information from a number of ITSM processes for its effectiveness.

[fair_n_hite_451]

Following along the "Asset vs Config" debate, I would suggest that they can be viewed thusly:

Asset Management is part of the "Strategic IT" function - budgets, SLA definition, financial tracking.

Config Management is more of an operational or tactical level function which supports the "how do I deliver the services we agreed to" set of questions.

Could one person do both? Sure. Are they related enough activities that that makes sense? Not really - the only things they share are the asset identifiers, but their use for them is completely different.

CrS