Government/Military Trends
EIA-836: Taking Configuration Management Standards to the Next Level
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Drop a pebble into a pond and you've initiated a chain of events directed by the forces of nature. Create a product that's part of a system, and you've invented the need for Configuration Management (CM), a discipline that has something in common with the ripple effect of waves in a pond.
As stated by Alan Lager2, leader of the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) team that's responsible for developing EIA Standard 836 (Configuration Management Data Exchange and Interoperability), CM is "the management of change." Mr. Lager should know. He's been involved with CM since his early days with Northrop Grumman, and now as an independent consultant serves as an elder statesman and spokesman for the CM discipline.
Genesis of CM
When asked to describe how CM got its start, Mr. Lager refers to ancient Greece and the Parthenon, an architectural structure with no straight lines that took 100 years to build. According to Mr. Lager, "The different pieces that fit into the structure had to be identified and related to one another. There had to be a rudimentary form of engineering drawing and product identification."
CM took a great leap forward in the 1960s. Weapons systems were becoming more sophisticated. The Russians and the Americans were engaged in a race into space. Greater product and systems complexity demanded more discipline to manage the rapid pace of change.
A Modern Day Discipline
About this time the Air Force documented best practices in CM in a standard called Air Force Systems Command Manual for Configuration Management (AFSCM375-1), which laid out the basic principles of CM for the first time:
- Identification
- Control
- Status accounting
- Audit
A series of service regulations and manuals followed and were eventually replaced with a military standard, then a Department of Defense (DoD) standard. As cooperation and collaboration between DoD and private industry gained momentum, the need for a common government/industry standard became apparent, leading first to development of ANSI/EIA-649 (National Consensus Standard for Configuration Management) and now to EIA-836.
What's Different About EIA-836?
First, it embodies a data dictionary that lets all participants speak a common CM language. Second, it applies the principles in ANSI/EIA-649, but does not dictate how to practice CM in any given organization. Third, it embraces Web-based communications technology in the form of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which allows the exchange of data across diverse hardware, operating systems, platforms, languages and applications.
EIA-836 is a voluntary consensus standard that provides a central source of CM information to help organizations exchange CM product information and associate it to disparate databases and systems. CD, PDF and hard copy representations of EIA-836 will soon be available from Global Engineering Documents®, the retail arm of IHS™, USA and Canada (1-800-854-7179), and International (303) 397-7956 soon.
With the benefit of over 30 years of hindsight, Mr. Lager describes CM as a process that "needs to be integrated into standard engineering practice."
2 Source: Alan E. Lager, an Engineering graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology, has been a leading industry Configuration Management and Data Management spokesman for over thirty years. He is currently the team leader for EIA Standard 836. He was the team leader and principal author of ANSI/EIA-649, and also authored MIL-HDBK-61 (Configuration Management Guidance) and a Data Management Handbook under contract to DoD.