Information Technology (IT) is a collaboration environment for business and engineering. The past decade has seen a reduction in business understanding of engineering principles because of the lack of trained engineers working in IT, while businesses have become increasingly dependent upon new and complex technologies. These new technologies, often still evolving, are system-of-systems environments and present significant challenges to early implementers. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one such system-of-systems that pushes the discipline of Software Configuration Management (SCM) beyond traditionally defined bounds. Evolving standards associated with SOA and the nature of SOA contribute to these challenges of governance and management: loose coupling of service operations, brokerage of third-party services, and virtualization of workspaces and environments.

This study resulted from an effort to bring a complex application with SOA Web Services (WS) under Configuration Management (CM) in parallel with defining CM process and procedures for the IT division of a Fortune 100 financial corporation. Research into the discipline of CM and the implementation of process management identified the need for further research into the CM of information-based rather than product-based systems. Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement strategy widely used by software “product” development and manufacturing, which includes engineering processes. Typically identified as a level 2 maturity process, applying CM in an unstructured environment in which a knowledge of engineering principles is lacking correlates to building the second floor of a building with no foundation or first floor. IT Service Management (ITSM), as implemented through the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), can provide the foundation and structured framework required for businesses delivering information-based services to successfully apply the engineering discipline of CM. As depicted in ITIL version 2, two major issues were corrected through the application and integration of engineering fundamentals: (1) consolidation of the processes for configuration, change, and release management following IEEE SCM standards and (2) defining IT Awareness System (ITAS) requirements suggested in the ITIL Configuration Management Database (CMDB)/IT Service Catalog. Research results have contributed to the bodies of knowledge for software engineering, engineering management, and communications engineering.