ITIL Configuration Management Tool Vendor Selection Checklist

Many vendors market tools they say will do some or the entire configuration management job. It is important to realize that the only perfect tool is one which you haven’t purchased yet—immediately after that, you’ll start to find the flaws. Because of the proprietary nature of the data structures used by configuration management tools, you’re going to be stuck with your selection for a very long time. This section describes how to make a choice between your many alternatives.

At a high level, the technique for choosing between various competing alternatives is not new to anyone. We determine a workable set of desirable characteristics, assign a relative weight to each characteristic, and then compare all the alternatives by assigning a score for each alternative to each characteristic. The results, are a matrix of scores. Totaling these scores will show the degree to which each alternative fits your needs.