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Configuration Management Guru?
By Charles Betz
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-03-06
I am surprised that this passage from section 8.9.1 of the ITIL v2 Change Management chapter (Service Support volume) never leaped out at me before:
"John Zachman (an American Configuration Management guru) proposed some years ago that, if IT wished to follow the example of Configuration Management experts such as the aviation and engineering domains, then business and IT processes would have to be defined to an excruciating and hitherto unprecedented level of detail in order to be controlled."
It's a most peculiar passage. John Zachman (with whom I have passing acquaintance) is known as the father of Enterprise Architecture. I have never heard his name mentioned in conjunction with Configuration Management. You can see the major articles he has written, or acknowledges as influential, here:
http://www.zifa.com/bibliography.html
Nothing on Configuration Management, under that name.
But the peculiarity may be illuminating. I have read some idiosyncratic materials (can not remember where, and would be indebted for a reference) regarding configuration management, which expressed the view that true configuration management for the enterprise included "managing the configuration" of the business architecture: processes, capabilities, functions, and what have you.
I think that the ITIL change and configuration management chapters must have been written by someone of this persuasion, which (for want of a better term) I will call the "Enterprise Configuration Management" school of thought. Seeing John Zachman as a configuration management expert would be a logical extension of this point of view.
I don't have any philosophical problems with this perspective, just pragmatic and utilitarian concerns - I just don't think that the world is ready for this definition of configuration management, and in fact history is moving in a different direction.
Has anyone else encountered the Enterprise Configuration Management point of view?
Comments
About the Author:
Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT
Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service
Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.
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