21.1 Company Infrastructure

The complexity of configuration management of the infrastructure is much higher than in the days of mainframes, when everybody in a company used the same version of the editor, for example. Many people are unfamiliar with the details of the infrastructure they use during their daily work. In many cases, this is not important. For some products, however, it may be crucial for parts of the infrastructure to be placed under configuration management like the rest of the product, such as when it is necessary to re-create earlier versions of the product. Every part of the infrastructure may be placed under configuration management: machines, peripherals, networks, operating systems, and tools.

Organizational Considerations

Most often, responsibility for configuration management of the infrastructure is placed with an internal IT department. Interfaces to the other organizational units, typically projects or other departments that develop products, must be clear. This is to ensure that what should be placed under configuration management actually is, and in a way useful for everybody affected. It does happen, however, that tools are placed under configuration management with the product for whose production they are deployed. Interfaces to suppliers and subcontractors must also be made clear.

Identification

Needless to say, the parts of the infrastructure that are to be placed under configuration management must be identified. It may be necessary to agree on a special convention or conventions for some parts. This could be in connection with a product that has strong external requirements for identification or to avoid conflicting unique identifications. It's rarely possible to perform tracing for infrastructure. This is possible only if the company has an explicit IT strategy to which traces may be provided.

Storage

Storage is special for the infrastructure, since configuration items are mostly distributed and in use. An important part of storage is registering where individual configuration items are "stored"where a specific workstation is placed, and which workstations have which versions of which tools installed. This task may be extensive and difficult, especially if the responsibility for the infrastructure is distributed or unclear.

An important aspect of storage is maintaining older parts of the infrastructure that are still under configuration management. How long to keep old configuration items must be agreed upon with users. A large public organization still has a need for running recalculations on some systems that are more than 30 years old, including printing special reports . This is possible only on an equally old printer, since newer printers are not wide enough. Keeping the old printer in storage eliminates the need to rewrite large trunks of the old reporting subsystem.

Change Control

Event registration will most often be in the form of upgrades or enhancements to the infrastructure. These may be requests from management, employees , or from the outside in connection with projects with special needs. Event registration may of course also be for faults in items.

Event registrations from different parts of a company concerning the infrastructure may often conflict. The configuration control board(s) in charge of events and change handling for the infrastructure should therefore include representatives of as many stakeholders as possible. Everybody using the infrastructure should be informed when changes are implemented. One consideration is whether to adopt all changes immediately or to use an older part even if a new one has been released.

The project plan and/or development plan must take into consideration whether new parts of the infrastructure are to be adopted during a project. Such changes can cause a lot of trouble in a project; such as if a customer can't handle documents written in a new version of a word processor or if some construction in the code is not acceptable anymore.

Status Reporting

Employees must be able to get a quick overview of the configuration of the infrastructure they use. This may include the infrastructure's composition as well as any pending event registrations or change requests.