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CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
appropriate there is a risk that the implementation may lead to a dysfunctional
operational process.
The choice of CSFs depends on the strategic vision behind a CMS initiative.
If the CMS (or, more likely, its technology) becomes an end in itself, rather than
a business-oriented process improvement project, a chosen CSF might be that
the business users are not involved or consulted because they may delay the
implementation. However, if the vision is of an institutionalised CMS used by all
of its stakeholders, then the opposite is true and the CSFs chosen might be the
full involvement of the business and the effective management of change for all
stakeholders.
Of course, the IT Group is a stakeholder in the CMS, but only one of many.
The obvious question for people wanting to implement an effective CMS is
‘Does our CMS strategy deliver any value to the business?’.
However, answering this question in a manner that lets you decide whether
your CMS implementation is a success or failure may not be straightforward.
For instance, are you dogmatic about what your CMS must do, and if it does not
do these things will you decide that it is not a success? Or, alternatively, are you
pragmatic: if your CMS does something useful, even if you did not quite
anticipate it achieving this, is that fine by you? Or are you somewhere in
between? In any case, when will your CMS have enough real, useful information
in it to support a useful proportion of your stakeholders? If you set a CSF or Key
Performance Indicator (KPI) based merely on the quantity of raw data in a
CMDB, it is unlikely that you will be able to demonstrate a real value added
to the business by the CMS.
If you are interested in more technical success indicators, does the level at which
your assets or configuration items are defined support the delivery of business
value, for example? Configuration items should not be so high level that business
practitioners cannot relate to them, nor so low level that maintaining them is a
major overhead.
Here are two fundamental questions for people seeking to implement a functional
CMS: do you understand the needs of your stakeholders; and do you believe in
the tool vendors’ magic bullets? Perhaps the key CSF for a successful CMS
implementation is that you can answer ‘yes’ to the first and ‘no’ to the second,
before you start.
Consideration of such issues provided the context for the delegates in the
interactive session in which to identify useful CSFs for the implementation of a
CMS. In addition, the ITIL Service Transition volume documents a set of CSFs
for Service Transition (which includes the CMS) in Chapter 9 (section 9.2).
These are related to those identified by the delegates below.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE INTERACTIVE SESSION
Twenty contributors to the discussion represented the practitioner community.
They included representatives from Financial Times, Fidelity Investments,
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