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CM Journal Articles Standards – are they really needed?
CM Journal Articles Standards – are they really needed?
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 Organizations generally prefer open
standards that are developed through formal and accountable standards bodies as
opposed to closed proprietary methods. There are already many international
standards and best practice frameworks that incorporate requirements for asset
and configuration management.
ITIL has long been recognised as the de facto industry standard for IT Service Management and the adoption of ITIL has been growing rapidly across the world. IT Service Management (ITSM) derives enormous benefits from a best practice approach. Change management and configuration management are core practices at the heart of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000, the auditing standard that is aligned with ITIL. ISO/IEC 20000 requires a service provider to deliver managed services of an acceptable quality for its customers. Many organizations across the world have achieved certification against ISO/IEC 20000. As ISO IEC 20000 entered the international standards arena a key issue has been harmonisation with other IT systems and software engineering standards. Change and configuration management terminology, definitions and requirements standards already exist in many of these standards. One of the key questions is ‘Can we harmonise the terms and definitions?' across a diverse range of assets, configurations and different lifecycle perspectives. Last year, ITIL was updated taking input from ITSM specialists and ITIL users to combine the latest thinking and best practices with sound, common sense guidance. The changes in ITIL V3 reflect the way ITSM has matured over the past decade. The main development is that V3 takes a lifecycle approach to guidance, as opposed to organising according to IT delivery sectors. ITIL is now based on a core of five titles: ITIL V3 models the processes and practices needed to manage configurations and changes across the service lifecycle and the end to end services. Service assets cover the service management system, knowledge, processes, people, finances, applications, information and infrastructure. The ITIL configuration management system is at the heart of service lifecycle management and service knowledge management. The new models in ITIL V3 for the Configuration Management Database(CMDB) and the Configuration Management System (CMS) are already helping both user organisations and vendors of configuration management solutions. Drivers for further standardisation are likely to emerge from the ITSM users and vendor community that are faced with real challenges on how to manage service assets, never ending changes across complex IT services and diverse technologies. These issues will be explored further at the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group and itSMF conference on The CMDB/CMS - the powerhouse of service management at Olympia, London, on 8 - 9 July, 2008. For further details see www.bcs-cmsg.org.uk or www.itsmf.co.uk. Shirley Lacy, Director, ConnectSphere - Shirley.lacy@connectsphere.com Shirley is the British Computer Society, (BCS), representative on the BSI committee that developed ISO/IEC 20000, the IT Service Management standard. She is also the vice chair of the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group. She co-authored the Service Transition core volume of ITIL® V3 with Ivor Macfarlane.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 February 2008 16:46 |
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