Inventorying information technology systems: supporting the "paradigm of change"

One of the most significant failures of the IT profession is the absence of systems to gather, support, and supply information for managing software items. Most IT professionals, if they consider software management, think in terms of version or configuration control license and patch management. Version control systems (VCSs) and software configuration management (SCM) systems aim to manage versions of individual software objects with support for linking into sets for release purposes. This has nothing to do with addressing the issues of controlling large amounts of geographically disbursed software, executing on different kinds of systems, maintained by hundreds to thousands of programmers. Software systems are the only major organizational asset with no real support for managing them based on information technology. An appropriate IT inventory management facility is the cornerstone of an integrated set of technologies, called the "paradigm of change" designed to address constantly changing technologies and business processes.