Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.
A management system is a set of policies, processes and procedures used by an organization to ensure that it can fulfill the tasks required to achieve its objectives. These objectives cover many aspects of the organization's operations. For instance, an environmental management system enables organizations to improve their environmental performance, and an occupational safety and health management system enables an organization to control its occupational health and safety risks.
Information technology (IT)governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance, focused on information technology (IT) and its performance and risk management. The interest in IT governance is due to the ongoing need within organizations to focus value creation efforts on an organization's strategic objectives and to better manage the performance of those responsible for creating this value in the best interest of all stakeholders. It has evolved from The Principles of Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9001 Quality management system.
Information technology service management (ITSM) are the activities performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
ISO/IEC 20000 is the international standard for IT service management. It was developed in 2005 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 and revised in 2011 and 2018. It was originally based on the earlier BS 15000 that was developed by BSI Group.
A configuration management database (CMDB) is an ITIL term for a database used by an organization to store information about hardware and software assets. It is useful to break down configuration items into logical layers. This database acts as a data warehouse for the organization and also stores information regarding the relationships among its assets. The CMDB provides a means of understanding the organization's critical assets and their relationships, such as information systems, upstream sources or dependencies of assets, and the downstream targets of assets.
Asset management is a systematic approach to the governance and realization of all value for which a group or entity is responsible. It may apply both to tangible assets and to intangible assets. Asset management is a systematic process of developing, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets in the most cost-effective manner.
Software asset management (SAM) is a business practice that involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications within an organization. According to ITIL, SAM is defined as “…all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control, and protection of the software assets…throughout all stages of their lifecycle.” Fundamentally intended to be part of an organization's information technology business strategy, the goals of SAM are to reduce information technology (IT) costs and limit business and legal risk related to the ownership and use of software, while maximizing IT responsiveness and end-user productivity. SAM is particularly important for large corporations regarding redistribution of licenses and managing legal risks associated with software ownership and expiration. SAM technologies track license expiration, thus allowing the company to function ethically and within software compliance regulations. This can be important for both eliminating legal costs associated with license agreement violations and as part of a company's reputation management strategy. Both are important forms of risk management and are critical for large corporations' long-term business strategies.
International standards in the ISO/IEC 19770 family of standards for IT asset management address both the processes and technology for managing software assets and related IT assets. Broadly speaking, the standard family belongs to the set of Software Asset Management standards and is integrated with other Management System Standards.
Information security management (ISM) defines and manages controls that an organization needs to implement to ensure that it is sensibly protecting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of assets from threats and vulnerabilities. The core of ISM includes information risk management, a process that involves the assessment of the risks an organization must deal with in the management and protection of assets, as well as the dissemination of the risks to all appropriate stakeholders. This requires proper asset identification and valuation steps, including evaluating the value of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and replacement of assets. As part of information security management, an organization may implement an information security management system and other best practices found in the ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27002, and ISO/IEC 27035 standards on information security.
Infra Corporation is a division of EMC Corporation that produces infraEnterprise, which is a multi-tier web-based IT Service Management software tool. The software is based on ITIL and it implements a number of ITIL processes, including Service Desk management, Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management, Availability Management and Service Level Management. The tool also includes a knowledge base module, which complies with principles of Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS).
IT cost transparency is a category of information technology management software and systems that enables enterprise IT organizations to model and track the total cost to deliver and maintain the IT Services they provide to the business. It is increasingly a task of management accounting. IT cost transparency solutions can integrate financial information such as labor costs, software licensing costs, hardware acquisition and depreciation, data center facilities charges from general ledger systems and combine this with operational data from ticketing, monitoring, asset management and project portfolio management systems to provide a single, integrated view of IT costs by service, department, GL line item and project. In addition to tracking cost elements, IT cost transparency may track utilization, usage and operational performance metrics in order to provide a measure of value or return on investment (ROI). Costs, budgets, performance metrics and changes to data points are tracked over time to identify trends and the impact of changes to underlying cost drivers in order to help managers address the key drivers in escalating IT costs and improve planning.
IFS AB is a multinational enterprise software company headquartered in Linköping, Sweden. The company develops and delivers AI driven enterprise cloud software for companies worldwide who want to differentiate on service. IFS has over 6,000 employees in more than 80 countries
Numara Software was a software company based in Tampa, Florida which made IT service and asset management software, targeted at network management and business process managers.
ZENworks, a suite of software products developed and maintained by OpenText for computer systems management, aims to manage the entire life cycle of servers, of desktop PCs, of laptops, and of handheld devices such as Android and iOS mobile phones and tablets. As of 2011 Novell planned to include Full Disk Encryption (FDE) functionality within ZENworks. ZENworks supports multiple server platforms and multiple directory services.
ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard to manage information security. The standard was originally published jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 2005, revised in 2013, and again most recently in 2022. There are also numerous recognized national variants of the standard. It details requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system (ISMS) – the aim of which is to help organizations make the information assets they hold more secure. Organizations that meet the standard's requirements can choose to be certified by an accredited certification body following successful completion of an audit. A SWOT analysis of the ISO/IEC 27001 certification process was conducted in 2020.
Omnitracker is a proprietary business process platform developed by Omninet GmbH in Germany. Omnitracker is developed as modular software for medium and large companies. It is used to track, control and evaluate relevant business processes. The main area of application is the support of ITIL compliant processes, which manages requests, incidents/ errors, customer inquiries from the moment of creation to completion. Omnitracker received certifications of the Federal Association of IT-Mittelstand and Pink Elephant that covers nine processes.
Tudor IT Process Assessment (TIPA) is a methodological framework for process assessment. Its first version was published in 2003 by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor based in Luxembourg. TIPA is now a registered trademark of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). TIPA offers a structured approach to determine process capability compared to recognized best practices. TIPA also supports process improvement by providing a gap analysis and proposing improvement recommendations.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of practices and a framework for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.
Data center management is the collection of tasks performed by those responsible for managing ongoing operation of a data center. This includes Business service management and planning for the future.
