Increasingly application deployment is a focus of the total CM picture. Why should it be? Isn't it something separate? Integration of application deployment with configuration management can both simplify the process and, in the optimal case, permit multiple simultaneous deployments without any additional effort. A goal here might be to allow different users to see a different versions of the application. Or it might be just to automate deployment. In this article, we'll look at the two main trends in deployment : the single point network application deployment and the more traditional deployment for either installation packaging or in-house use.

What title should we give a CM professional? Various ones are used, such as CM tool administrators, build engineers, release engineers, product installers, and more. It may appear that these roles are somewhat similar, but there are differences in the responsibilities and corresponding skills if you look at the context of the role.

Raising the BarIT organizations are looking for new levels of productivity.  In an era of relative talent shortages, the ability to seize business opportunities depends on making dramatic increases in productivity.  At the same time, the government has raised the bar substantially with governance mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley.  Add to this globalization, outsourcing and distributed work forces that have the effect making even smaller companies manage teams over geographic and time zones.  However, the coming whammy is the dramatic loss of talent looming up as baby-boomers retire.

All of us can think of examples of bad processes. They seem to be indelibly burned into our memories, but it may be hard to think of what a high-quality process looks like, because it feels like we've never seen one. Of course, that's not really true. All of us have experienced good processes; they are the ones that were invisible! Processes that are helpful, efficient and effective also seem to disappear into the background. Unless something draws our attention to them, we may not notice them at all!