Configuration Management Forum
Versioning, versioning everywhere....

These days, IT Management and governance generally are defined by, "what you have, where it is, how it is configured, the history of how it got where it is; and where it is going". As the pendulum swings towards more governance and regulation, this implies that people will start wanting to apply version management far more widely than it currently is. 

So, what is the new Big Idea in version management? The "versioning ecosystem", provides JavaScript and Web Services APIs to a versioning tool with a federated (physically distributed but, logically, centrally managed) repository database and a hosted "Cloud delivery" option. With this, you can build your own applications and use Web Services to give them strong versioning underneath, neither re-inventing the wheel nor breaking any existing web-application infrastructure - and the proof-of-concept will be really easy to set up in a hosted environment. 

There are two further insights; firstly, that versioning is not limited to software; as ITIL underlines, everything that is essential to business service delivery may need to be under configuration management; and, secondly, for the business there is a human aspect to all this. A tool can mark a version; a human being adds the all-important description that says why a particular version is important to that person - or to the organisation. We are beginning to need to look at "versioning everywhere", and "everywhere" isn't merely "everywhere in the IT group".   When an organisation such as the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) can build its entire automation infrastructure on a rich versioning platform, versioning is becoming a fundamental part of business process and business governance.

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