ITAM and CCM - A Unified Approach

TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: IT ASSET AND CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
IT Asset Management and
Configuration Management:
A Unified Approach
David A. Messineo
CA SERVICES

Copyright © 2008 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary
SECTION 1: CHALLENGE 2
The Challenge of Performing Effective Asset
Lifecycle Management
The Division of Asset and Configuration
Management
SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY 3
Crossing the Chasm
Value
Processes
Management Information
People and Processes
People and Technology
SECTION 3: BENEFITS 9
Achieving Interoperability to Unify
Management Activities
SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS 10
SECTION 5: ABOUT THE AUTHOR 11

TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: IT ASSET AND CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT 1
Executive Summary
Challenge
For decades, enterprises tracked resource investments using fixed asset management
systems and related practices. However, as the concept of IT Asset Management grew in
popularity, greater emphasis was placed on understanding the cost of a technology asset
throughout its lifecycle. Moreover, ITIL® best practices have outlined the fundamental
processes of IT Asset, Configuration and Change Management and how organizations
should implement them to better manage IT assets, resources and services over time. Yet,
despite an understanding of the overarching goals of these activities, and the steps needed
to achieve them, many organizations struggle to align the responsibilities surrounding IT
Asset, Configuration and Change Management to the proper people, processes and
technology.
Opportunity
In order to effectively resolve these difficulties, organizations need visibility into the
underlying differences among IT Asset, Configuration and Change Management. With this
insight at hand, they can then allocate responsibilities specific to each activity to the proper
authorities and begin to foster an environment where people, processes and technology
work in concert to improve the management of an asset’s lifecycle. To help organizations
achieve these goals, CA provides a host of IT Asset, Configuration and Change
Management technologies that are based on ITIL best practices and can be implemented
to streamline and automate these processes. Leveraging CA’s Unified Service Model, these
solutions build consistency in the application and integration of technology across all roles
by providing a 360-degree perspective of assets and asset-related information.
Benefits
Achieving a clear understanding of the unique organizational responsibilities for IT Asset,
Configuration and Change Management helps you shrink the gap separating these
processes. Doing so improves decision making as it pertains to the provisioning of assets,
resources and configuration items — and their impact on your organization’s service
platform — and allows it to be unified under a single comprehensive strategy. Utilizing CA
technology to drive these activities helps you unify asset and service lifecycle management
and allow them to support each other as complementary processes.

The Challenge of Performing Effective Asset Lifecycle Management
For decades, enterprises tracked investments in physical assets, capital and other resources
using fixed asset management systems. However, the acceleration of IT costs over recent years
has necessitated that technology assets be managed with a more meticulous, granular view
that promotes greater attention to detail.
Traditional fixed asset management generally focused only on the front- and back-end
processes of procurement and disposal, which accounts for less than 20 percent of the total
cost of an asset over time. With a concentration on tracking the costs associated with the
entire asset lifecycle — the total cost of ownership (TCO) — modern IT Asset Management
was developed as the mechanism to improve the comprehensive management of assets from
end to end.
Though it made great enhancements to the process of managing assets — and helped
businesses better track TCO along the way — IT Asset Management is not enough. As IT
departments become more complex, TCO began to reflect only a fraction of the Total
Economic Risk (TER) related to the usage of an asset. With this fact in mind, organizations are
now demanding a financial management strategy that presents opportunities to
simultaneously reduce costs and protect revenue of their technology investments.
Because assets are assembled into sets of resources that ultimately become business services,
there is a direct relationship between the TER of an asset and its related IT services. Therefore,
any sufficient financial strategy must manage the risks associated with not only an asset’s
lifecycle, but also a service’s lifecycle, as well.
To effectively protect revenue means enterprises must understand that the provisioning of
assets today impacts the service platform — and business architecture — of tomorrow.
The Division of IT Asset and Configuration Management
ITIL best practices outline the processes that should be implemented to support a service’s
lifecycle, especially through Change and Configuration Management. As they pertain to
supporting the configuration of services, Change Management is the mechanism to review and
control risks, and Configuration Management centers around managing involved assets. Within
this context, assets are identified as Configuration Items (CIs) and are stored in a Configuration
Management Data Base (CMDB).
While the risks associated with an asset are assessed in terms of its capital value, ITIL defines
its economic impact as a resource for the service — meaning that the cost of the CI can be many
times its capital value. For example, a malfunctioning server worth $10,000 could be the point of
failure that negatively impacts a service supporting business revenue in excess of $1 million an
hour.
Understanding this connection is a critical step in effectively forging the relationships between
assets and services. ITIL expresses these dependencies by managing the availability of assets
through IT Asset Management and the integrity of services through Configuration
Management.
SECTION 1: CHALLENGE
2 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF: IT ASSET AND CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Unfortunately, the past several years have seen a growing rift place undue strain on the crucial
connection between IT Asset Management and Configuration Management. Furthermore,
many conflicts between the concepts exist because of confusion in terminology, accountability
and process coordination regarding implementing and leveraging technology. These conflicts
are exacerbated by a fundamental misunderstanding of the roles associated each process, as
exemplified by such questions as:
• What’s the difference between an asset and a CI?
• Which information repository, the asset inventory or the CMDB, is the source of “truth?”
• What information should be stored and maintained in each repository?
• What processes contribute information to each repository?
Worse yet, Change and Configuration Management are often confused, and when taken
together, seem to compete with the concept of Installs, Moves, Adds and Changes (IMACs) in
IT Asset Management. Acknowledging the differences — and how they relate to tasks,
accountability and responsibilities — in these very distinct practices has been a point of
struggle for many organizations.
Crossing the Chasm
To begin fostering a greater understanding of the relationship between IT Asset and
Configuration Management, organizations must first clarify the differences and conflicts
between the two on several levels — from functions that support services, to the data
definitions that allow the functions to be managed — within the context of three main areas:
• Value
• Processes
• Management Information
Value
In IT Asset Management, a given asset exists at a planned, owned (authorized) and discovered
(audited) state, but its value is always rooted in time-based costing. Conversely, Configuration
Management establishes value in terms of the CI’s assignment in the service portfolio,
recognizing that baseline value is reset as changes occur to the CI and its assignments over
time.
Processes
IT Asset Management addresses the availability of assets on a per-cost and per-policy basis,
while Change Management is the mechanism that reviews and controls risks as a result of
modifications to the service make-up. Meanwhile, Configuration Management focuses on
managing the readiness of related qualified assets, as well as the integrity of related services.
SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY

Management Information
IT Asset Management encourages the use of standards to simplify the provisioning process.
However, when an asset is tracked as a CI, it is because it requires that a specific managed
process be in place before changes can be made to it — a direct sign that a service must be
authorized by accounting for the risks associated with the assets it encompasses. By viewing a
service this way, management requires IT to understand relationships between and among
assets as critical resources.
With an understanding of these fundamental differences at hand, crossing the chasm then
requires addressing two simultaneously different, but interrelated, paradigms of:
• People and Processes
• People and Technology
People and Processes
As they relate to people and processes, IT Asset, Configuration and Change Management
possess unique contexts that, when understood both individually and collectively, help to foster
a greater understanding of how the three work together to guide IT activities.
IT ASSET MANAGEMENT
IT Asset Management utilizes the concepts of ownership and availability to gain focus from a
property perspective. This process manages support costs by encouraging the use of standards
to simplify provisioning. By building a financial strategy that aligns cash flow and expense
management, IT Asset Management ensures transparency of these responsibilities and
provides visibility to shareholders, auditors and government agencies. In addition, this strategy
applies an overarching fiscal direction to the provisioning of IT resources.
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
Configuration Management addresses the assembly of resources that build and support
services, the importance assets bring to service resources and how asset relationships
collectively build service value. The financial and business impacts related to Configuration
Management are generally much greater than that of IT Asset Management, because any
disruption in a given service can have a significant effect on the bottom line.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Change Management acts as a complementary process to Configuration Management that
ensures all changes made to a CI are approved and adhere to strict Request for Change (RFC)
policies — in addition to the necessary activities of impact analysis and conditional approvals.
By leveraging the CMDB to identify CIs and their interdependencies, Change and Configuration
Management are able to work together to manage the modification and deployment stages in
the service lifecycle.

PROCESS ALIGNMENT
Finally, crossing the chasm requires that the three processes encourage IT and the business it
supports to align their efforts to meet the objectives of the organization. By simultaneously
balancing two seemingly opposing goals — maintaining a stable, functional environment, while
adopting changes — these three management processes effectively become the engine that
drives organizational agility and move the economics of IT from costs to investments and
resources to coordination.
Aligning these processes demands an auditing structure that ensures cooperation and
effectiveness. Auditing takes place for each of the processes, and requires steps at each level to
be successful. Specifically:
• Auditing IT Asset Management requires the reconciliation of provisioned and discovered
assets to ensure the assets identified in the organization are, in fact, the ones that were
originally provisioned.
• Auditing Configuration Management compares a CI’s actual state to its authorized state —
which is generally noted in the CMDB through the use of baselines and versioning —to
identify and reconcile the CI against a change order and ensure the proper values are being
tracked.
• Auditing Change Management identifies actual change outcomes in light of specific requests
by reviewing the planned state of assets or CIs, with the discovered state of assets or CIs
and creating logs on the various systems that have been, or are expected to be, changed.
From a people and process perspective, crossing the chasm means that individuals in differing
roles correctly associate the artifacts of their responsibility areas to the services dependent
upon them. Because these artifacts often represent property or entitlements of the business,
this requires the definition of an asset to be more highly inclusive.
In particular, management must acknowledge that assets exist in both tangible and intangible
forms — patent and service versus hardware and software, for example. Typically, the
prevailing definition used in IT Asset Management does not adequately cover that range. The
benefit of using a CI, however, is that it expands the definitions of assets to simultaneously
represent management, IT, users and service providers across the value chain.
Ultimately, the importance of recognizing assets as CIs lies in the ability to proactively protect
stakeholders from unnecessary risks by acknowledging that a change to an asset may impact a
given service. When an asset is managed as a CI, it assures both IT and the business that a
managed change process will be in place and that the coordination needed for service success
will not be undermined by organizational gaps in IT awareness.

People and Technology
Crossing the chasm in terms of people and technology poses its own set of challenges. Much
of the management automation software that has been developed in the past 10 years was
built around the concept that IT Asset Management and Configuration Management were
separate duties. Often, such tools could only inconsistently support the roles of other
processes.
Integrating these tools did not always close the gap, because underlying data sets usually
ignore the differences between CIs and assets, making reconciling the views nearly impossible.
But without the support of common sources, interoperability requires that various systems be
tactically accessed to build a comprehensive view.
CA’s development of a Unified Service Model alleviates many of these issues. The model builds
consistency in the application and the integration of technology across all roles. It builds a 360-
degree perspective of an asset or a CI — whichever lens you prefer to use.
Adopting this model begins by following simple rules about the distinctive responsibilities of
both IT Asset Management and Configuration Management, to ensure that the distinction is
supported by the definition of roles. From there, the task is to apply processes appropriately so
services relying on assets are valued and controlled through management of configurations and
changes.
For successful service management, CA recommends the following when discussing the
differences between assets and CIs:
• When referring to IT Asset Management, assume the focus is on tangible assets. If
intangible assets are managed, ensure they are directly related to IT processes.
• When referring to Configuration Management — and CIs in particular — focus on those CIs
that tend to be more intangible in nature.
CA recommends the following for implementing the practice of IT Asset Management:
• If reconciliation is executed between an owned (authorized) set of assets and a discovered
(audited) set of assets, it should be performed outside of the Configuration Management
process, and not based on asset attributes that are managed through change control.
• Changes in asset availability — whether driven physically, logically or contractually — should
be reviewed to determine if the change will impact the services managed in Configuration
Management.
CA recommends the following for implementing the practice of Configuration Management:
• Assets should be managed as CIs only if they are under change control and present a risk to
the business from a services perspective.
• CIs should be identified through a focus on those services and the supporting infrastructure
that are critical to the business.
• Not all assets are CIs and not all CIs are assets — however, should a specific asset be
identified as a CI, the proper sequence for establishing the CI should be to associate the
asset record to a CI record in the CMDB through Change Management.

• Discovery tools should not create CI records unless part of a specific strategy. CI
relationships are generally used to keep the CMDB up to date, and all applications
possessing that authority need to be specifically identified.
• Synchronization and reconciliation of CI information should focus on the attributes and
relationships that inform the Change Management process and impact the management of a
service’s lifecycle
Currently, several CA tools leverage these recommendations to provide support for IT Asset,
Configuration and Change Management, including:
• IT Asset Management — primary solutions:
– CA Asset Portfolio Manager (APM) — Outlines the ownership of property information as
it relates to owned (authorized) assets.
– CA Asset & Discovery — Reveals the discovered (audited) state of IT assets.
– CA Software Compliance Manager (SwCM) — Understands the software licensing
characteristic of assets.
• IT Asset Management — supporting solutions:
– CA Service Catalog — Supports the asset provisioning process by standardizing offerings.
– CA Asset Import Tool & Data Adaptors — Imports asset-related information contained in
third-party systems.
• Configuration Management — primary solutions:
– CA Service Desk — Manages Requests for Change (RFC) to ensure that CI impacts are
identified and proper approvals are in place.
– CA Configuration Management Database (CMDB) — Provides reporting and visualization
into the relationships of configuration items (CI).
– CA CMDB/Cohesion — Discovers CI relationships between applications and their
supporting resources.
• Configuration Management — supporting solutions:
– Federated Adaptors — Imports CI data from third-party sources.
– CA Software Change Manager Distributed (SwCM-D) — Supports integration with
software change management processes.
– CA NSM/Spectrum/Wily — Provides integration with operational tools that discover
“physical” and “logical” CI relationships.
– CMDB Mainframe Adaptors — Transmits CI-relevant mainframe info into the CMDB.
Collectively, these tools can be configured to orchestrate the proper adoption of processes that
support both asset lifecycle management and service lifecycle management. This includes
other ITIL processes, such as Incident, Problem and Release Management.

Achieving Interoperability to Unify Management Activities
Achieving interoperability among the disciplines of IT Asset, Configuration and Change
Management allow these processes to become both meaningful and sustainable.
Interoperability, however, requires a separation of process from outcome. Enabling a unified
view of IT Asset, Configuration and Change Management helps you understand how the acts
of asset lifecycle management and service lifecycle management result in specific outcomes
that improve overall business processes.
CA’s IT Asset, Configuration and Change Management technology employs an integrated
Unified Service Model that helps accomplish the goals of each process independently, while
offering the interoperability that eliminates departmental gaps and allowing these activities to
work in unison to support a common goal.
By understanding the differences in organizational responsibilities for IT Asset, Configuration
and Change Management, the chasm spreading among these processes can be crossed, and
even eliminated entirely. Moreover, decisions about the provisioning of assets, resources and
configuration items — and their impact on the service platform of tomorrow — can be unified
under a single comprehensive strategy, instead of operating in a vacuum of disparate
organizational silos.
Leveraging CA technology to enable these processes helps you ensure that asset and service
lifecycle management are viewed as interconnected activities that can co-exist and support
each other as equal partners. As such, the ability to continually understand how assets
assemble into resources that support critical business services will become a core competency.
About the Author
David A. Messineo is an IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioner with more than 20 years'
experience developing and deploying enterprise-level software solutions focused on IT
management. David is currently a Practice Director at CA, where he focuses on developing
best practices for the consistent delivery of large-scale implementations. David holds both an
ITIL Manager and an eSCM Certification.
To learn more about the CA CMDB architecture and technical approach, visit
ca.com/service-mgmt.
SECTION 3: BENEFITS
David A. Messineo
CA SERVICES
SECTION 5
SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS

Notes

CA (NSD: CA), one of the world’s leading independent,
enterprise management software companies, unifies and
simplifies complex information technology (IT) management
across the enterprise for greater business results. With our
Enterprise IT Management vision, solutions and expertise,
we help customers effectively govern, manage and secure IT.
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ITAM and CCM - A Unified Approach

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