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Is the "enterprise" (synonyms "organization," "company," "agency," "corporation") a candidate for Configuration Management? Is decision change traceability a requirement - a configuration item -- to be identified, tracked, maintained, and provided as a history of events? As the CMMI and Sarbanes-Oxley impact our organizations, do we have a responsibility to step up to the challenges that they present -- which are most often CM related functions? Most of us who practice CM know that CM is everywhere - if you understand it, you see it daily, and even hourly. In fact, if you are like me, you listen to the nightly news or read the newspaper, and instinctively understand that the majority of issues faced by organizations that lead to expensive and needless crises for them are nothing more than failure to apply the fundamental principles of Configuration Management. But many others in our organizations believe that CM is only valuable and needed if it's practiced at the project or program level - if, in fact, they see any reason for CM at all. Are they correct? or are they delimiting the practice of CM, ignoring the obvious, or even damaging it -- or their careers and ours? In these days of corporate responsibility to retain and provide data to support their transactions and decisions, is CM a natural facilitator that is going unleveraged, unappreciated, and poorly applied? My view is that the enterprise is a big configuration item - made up of smaller components and piece parts the comprise the whole organization. How many times have you seen situations wherein one arm of the organization is completely unaware or oblivious to what another arm of the organization is doing? Isn't it our job, in CM, to prevent that? When you consider the cost of the interruption in forward momentum, the impact on the business bottom line, the needless waste of money and time, and the failure of consistent processes in the continuum of Change Management - isn't applying CM to that situation a savings, and an insurance policy against disaster? How can we make this point in our respective organizations, and earn the opportunity to contribute at the enterprise level? One obvious obstacle is that what we do is not well understood by anyone in our organizations. They see us as limited to a product, a contract, a program, or a division of our organizations, only. The unknown is always threatening to people. Allowing us to remain an unknown is our own fault - in the end, we have the ability, and the vision, to change their thinking through enlightenment. Another obvious challenge for us is that those who run our organizations are not always "friends" to CM - corporate management rarely really understands or appreciates the role of CM in their organizations. As long as we are funded contract direct, they are tolerant. In the case of the systems engineer, for example, he sees us as a support function that is not well-trained, not his equal educationally, and a functional support area that should not equal his own. He even bounds our involvement in many programs by applying his own yardstick to what we are allowed to do, on his team. In the case of the program manager, we are his organizational albatross, all too often - we are forced on him many times because of arcane requirements that he prefers not to understand or recognize. We have not been rewarded, in our profession, for speaking up and asking for support to practice our craft at the enterprise level. Pretend for a moment that you have the power to move forward to present your case at the highest levels of your organizations -- what would you say, and how would you make your case? Think it over - the easy pathway is not always the rewarding one. Cynthia C. Hauer the Chief Executive Officer of Millennium Data Management, in Huntsville, Alabama. She has 21 years of experience in Information Technology which includes extensive involvement in CM, DM, data base design, user interface, data storage, CALS and all facets of system design and implementation. Ms Hauer holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and is certified as CMIIC and CCDM, certifications in both ICM/CMII and NDIA, respectively. You can reach Ms. Hauer by email at chauer@cmcrossroads.com
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 January 2006 04:58 |
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