Configuration management and Trust

As readers probably know, I’m interested in configuration management—but there’s more to it than just change management, as I point out, in the context of the 2014 BCS CMSG Conference, here. The CMSG’s annual Conference is coming up soon, and as well as Change, Configuration and Release Management, it has streams dealing with Software Asset Management (SAM) and Continuous Delivery.

This ties in with one the main themes at the IBM Innovate conference this year—”Innovate@Speed”, but with Trust – this is achieved through IBM’s flavour of DevOps at scale. One of the use cases presented at Innovate was for the use of Agile in the nuclear industry and the increase in delivery speed you can get by removing waste. If, for instance, all stakeholders are actually involved in development, you won’t waste time scheduling and running meetings to keep ‘external stakeholders’ informed. Of course, Agile in the nuclear industry can’t involve cutting corners or leaving out useful controls; but there are still opportunities for removing waste and speeding up delivery, using Agile techniques, whilst still preserving desired outcomes.

Providing an increased speed of service delivery using Agile at scale involves, in general, ‘just enough’ governance; the amount of governance necessary, in particular circumstances, for stakeholders to have trust in the outcomes. Effective, efficient (probably automated), software asset management seems, to me, to be an essential basis for trust—how can you claim any sort of control of what you don’t know you have—and there are plenty of opportunities for waste-removal savings in SAM by removing support for software that no-one is using.

So, if you are interested in continuous delivery using Agile at scale, at the 2014 CMSG conference, you can meet people who understand both continuous delivery and implementing ‘just enough’ management of the assets involved—surely, a winning combination?