Organisations invest huge amounts of money in IT equipment and ancillary resources, which are assets of the organisation. Accordingly, we need to maintain information about those assets in terms of their source, value, location, who controls them etc. This is asset management.
Configuration management goes beyond this in providing us with information about the relationships that exist between the various components. This is essen- tial to effective service management solutions since this information underpins all of the other processes particularly incident, problem, availability and change management.
When a change is proposed, comprehensive configuration information enables the rapid and accurate assessment of the impact of the change on services and components. Similarly, calls to the service desk can be simplified if the agent can automatically see what services and systems the caller uses.