Configuration Management (CM) must be implemented before Change Management (ChM)?

• A Yes
• B No
• C Maybe

While preparing for the ITIL Foundation Certificate exam this was one question I was stuck for a long time. The intuitive answer seems to be 'Yes', because if you don't know what you have how do you know it has changed? This is not a blanket statement, of course a change from Solaris to Linux in the enterprise is perceptible and can be assessed without a CM process in place. However, how do you measure if all the Solaris libraries, packages, etc have been ported to Linux without having aCMDB that holds information about the low-level modules? So to truly manage low-level infrastructure and control its change through ChM CM must be implemented. Right? Wait, but who specifies the order of ITIL process implementations? I didn't come across any suggested implementation guidelines during my study, as far as I had learnt ITIL was a collection of best practices and didn't propose any rigid implementation order for the processes. So the answer must be 'No.' As it turns out the latter reasoning turns out to be the correct one and the correct answer is no. As a side note for those preparing for the exam look out for words such as 'must' or 'should' in the questions,ITIL does not impose the implementation.

Score: 3.0, Votes: 1