SACM: 5 Key Activities in Service Asset & Configuration management

The ITIL Service Transition stage is a critical stage in the ITIL Service Asset and Configuration Management process (SACM). Online ITIL training provides detailed explanations about the role of SACM within the ITIL lifecycle. We will be reviewing the SACM process, then we will look at the five process activities in the SACM process.

Revisiting SACM and its objectives
Each service provided by an IT service provider has components that are integral to its operation. Let’s take, for example, a messaging service. The components that contribute to the overall operation of the service are servers, software and networks. Administrators run the show. And everything else that is involved. SACM addresses these components, their attributes and their relationships. It is omniscient throughout the service lifecycle, making it one of ITIL’s most important processes and possibly the first to be implemented.
Before we get to the five process activities, let’s review the goals of the SACM process. The first goal is support for control objectives and customer and business needs. The second goal is to ensure that IT service management processes are efficient and effective. The third goal is to reduce compliance and quality issues. The final goal is to optimize IT configuration, capabilities, resources, and service assets. SACM’s objectives are to define and control components of services and infrastructure. It also maintains accurate configuration information about the historical, current, and planned state of services and infrastructure.
We now have context and can discuss the five steps of SACM.
SACM: Management and Planning
Management and Planning is the first activity. Many assets are available to IT service providers. Services, applications, tools, components etc. To avoid confusion, IT service providers must have a structured and logical versioning and release system for configuration items. How to build releases, establish baselines, and do versioning. It is important to do so in a controlled way. These activities are documented in the SACM configuration management program.
First, we must plan what configuration items we will be using. One company might want to label each component of a server as configuration items. A cluster of servers might be referred to as a configuration item by another company. Each IT service provider will have to decide what level of labeling configuration items is best for them. The service industry generally refers to a server as a “CI”, a router as an “CI” and sometimes a monitor as a “CI”. The CI is not managed by each component individually. This must be considered.
SACM: Configuration Identification
The second activity of SACM is Configuration Identification. Each configuration item of the IT service provider’s IT service provider must be named, labeled, and the correct versioning of that configuration item is done after creating the configuration management plan. This will come in handy if configuration items need to be reviewed later. Although it may seem like a small step, proper identification of configuration items can make a huge difference later in the SACM process. If configuration items and their versions don’t have the correct labels, it will be difficult to revert to a baseline configuration state if a new version of the software is not deployed.

SACM: Configuration Control
Next, in the third activity of SACM Configuration Control, modifications to configuration items are managed. Each configuration item is changed in a controlled way. Ther