Policies
Policies represent the governance that is applied to the Configuration Management process. A policy describes the rules and boundaries that are applied to the process to ensure appropriate controls are in place. This ensures consistency and repeatability but also identifies the level of flexibility a practitioner has when executing the process, procedure, or work instruction. Policies will be discussed in more detail with examples in the following subsections.
Configuration item
A CI policy defines the criteria and attributes of a CI. This policy establishes what a CI is and the information about it to be collected and maintained. For example, every CI will have at least one relationship with another one. Every CI must fall under change management control. In general, this policy should establish the minimum required information about a CI – that is, relationships, where it is used, the services supported, its owner, its unique identifier, and so on.
