ABSTRACT
This chapter considers configuration management personnel and planning, configuration control, and configuration auditing, and reporting. Many organizations assign change authorization responsibility to a configuration approval board chaired by the chief information officer and composed of representatives from the user, the developers, the maintainers, and other systems professionals. The configuration items are used to define configuration objects, concrete tools that can be used to support the change process. Configuration management standards help to enforce quality, increase productivity, facilitate the management process, and reduce misinterpretation. The purpose of configuration auditing is to ensure that the approved changes have been implemented. The auditing process reviews all the changes, investigates any conflicts or ripple effects, and looks for omissions or violations of configuration management standards. A key responsibility of configuration management is to keep track of changes. A system is composed of numerous interrelated subsystems and/or programs.
