And then there are the noise factors—the stream of service requests for minor changes that must be made every day to accommodate upgrades, patches, replacements for failed components and routine configurations for capacity and performance. These move-add-delete changes to the configuration database can easily double or triple the database maintenance effort.

Every change you make is an opportunity for error, too, so you need even more validation and verification processes in place, as well as audit and review procedures.

It would be nice to have more of this fully automated and there are some good tools available, but none really does everything you need, at the scale required, with the ease and convenience you'd like. As system complexity continues to rise, even as we consolidate onto fewer vendors and the number of monitored and tunable parameters in the production environment increases, configuration management is becoming more critical and management technologies aren't keeping up.

This will be a major headache for the next few years, until the management tools evolve, and it won't be helped by services-oriented architecture and software-as-a-service deployments, which are designed to make implementation details transparent.

It won't hurt a bit when everything runs smoothly, but when a problem surfaces, get out the Excedrin Migraine.

John Parkinson has been a business and IT consultant for more than two decades. Please send questions and comments to CIO Insight editors.