5 Ways to Make your CMS Investment more Effective

By A Website Design

With a Configuration Management System in place and operational, your organization should see a number of benefits like:

• Efficient and quick resolution of IT incidents
• Escalation of incidents with greater speed and accuracy
• Ability to track changes and anticipate problems
• Control over environmental items (such as configuration settings)
• Discover trends related to system capacity, availability and management of incidents

This is the upside for what a CMS can bring your organization.
The downside is  your Configuration Management System can not and will not present an accurate and detailed view of your environment if the data is inaccurate. There is absolutely no room for error regarding the data in your Configuration Management System.  The value that CMS promises your organization is only as good as the process that governs its operation and the foundation of data within. All the benefits mentioned above will vanish if the CMS is not actively and correctly managed. The information held in your CMS lies at the core of how your IT organization makes decisions, so it needs to be valid, current, accessible, manageable and analyzable. The end result can be catastrophic for an organization and the CMS can go from being a "Holy Grail" to a dangerous liability.

You need to ensure your CMS remains relevant to your IT organization's operations. Here are 5 areas to focus on to keep your CMS on the right track, and justify your CMS investment.

 

#1 Arm the Configuration Manager

A key characteristic of today's large IT organizations is constant change. Whether it be application deployment, software distribution, or a patch to a remote server, you must empower the configuration manager with the tools to perform such duties as:

• The ability to dig deep down to the most granular configuration settings and track the consistency of changes across environments
• Compare environments down to  the most granular level to intelligently identify the smallest changes and differences that put environment stability at risk.

#2 Make Frequent Comparisons

By comparing two different environments, or an environment's current state with a historical snapshot of when it was working well or its golden baseline, IT Operations and Infrastructure organizations can quickly and easily identify and analyze the changes and differences that made or could potentially make their environment unstable.

#3 Feed Metrics

You can't manage what you can't measure, and this is key to your Configuration Management process. Specific metrics can provide feedback on efficiency and productivity, ultimately improving the business, but you need to be able to gauge these metrics, by gathering the key information. For instance, you need to provide information on CMS performance about the number of unauthorized configurations that have occurred, and the number of incidents that result from failed changes.

Other key data you need to measure your CMS success is:

Change Management
- Percentage of failed changes
- Number of unauthorized changes
- Outages during changes
- Percentage of changes on time
- Percentage of changes causing incidents

Release Management
- Number of incidents caused by releases
- Percentage of releases on time

#4 Automation Drives the Success of the CMS

In large scale organizations, automation is key to driving the configuration management process.  With the sheer number of changes happening on even a daily basis, it is impossible for change management to keep track of change without automated capabilities. You need to compare and track the consistency of changes across an environment, and as an application passes from one environment to another, like preproduction to production. For example,  automated discovery of detailed configuration parameters can  help to hasten the process of incident management and finding the root-cause of environment incidents. This can cut incident investigation time and  help you to restore  normal operations as quickly as possible, minimizing the impact on the operating environment and to end-users.

#5 Successful CMS Is Key to IT Operations

Beyond just the successful implementation of a comprehensive Configuration Management System, you need to extract the value that this system can offer your IT operations. For an IT organization, success will be measured on performance, availability, and support for stable environments. With constant deployments and new changes occurring, IT needs a high performance CMS to meet these challenges. This can be integrated with other IT processes, to ensure that the IT environment will remain stable and sustainable.

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