My following three points would help us in understanding the relationship between asset and CI:
- All assets are not CIs
- All CIs are not assets
- Some assets are CIs and some CIs are assets
Confused!!!
Please refer to my previous post "Understanding A Configuration Item (CI)". This post would help you understand how we can validate if an item qualifies to be a CI.
Let me clarify each of these points with an example:
All Assets are not CIs:
Items like phones or our office ACs are assets but these are not delivering any IT service and thus does not qualify to be a CI
All CIs are not Assets:
Various documents like Process Documents, SOP, Agreements, etc. qualify to be a CI. Also, items like freewares, ports, virtual machines, etc. qualify to be a CI. But none of these has a financial value attached to it and thus they do not qualify as an asset.
Some Assets are CIs and some CIs are Assets
Some of the assets like physical servers, licensed softwares, etc. are an asset and qualify to be a CI as well.
Thus, using set theory we can define relationship between Asset and CI as:
Hi Sumit,
ReplyDeleteThis clears a lot if dounts, however would like to konw, if an object is classified as both asset and as a CI(server) how to decide which information to be stored as a CI information or an asset information.
Example: RAM/OS information of a server should be treated as a CI information or as an Asset information??
Typically any financial information would go as an Asset information while attributes that can change during production life cycle along with the relationship information would be stored as CI information.
ReplyDeletePractically, it all depends how Configuration Mgmt and Asset Management processes are designed and attributes for CI and asset classified. Few information may be found in some cases to be captured as an asset info by one organization while as a CI info by others. So it all boils down to how an organization has designed these processes and the policy that they have defined.