People as CIs

One Frequently Asked Question in CM forums is whether people (a.k.a. resources...) should be modelled as Configuration Items. The mere question, with the implicit assumption that it might make sense, is a simple way to draw a line between CM and SCM.

CM is indeed a technologically (formally) oriented way to assist with an old problem, in an old paradigm: management, understood as a decision process. It is essentially the very same problem as Plato's role of philosophy in assisting the tyran (as he himself already unsuccessfully practiced in Syracuse).

The situation in which it makes sense to speak of SCM is a radical departure from this paradigm: this in which the complexity of the challenges at hand questions the validity of making decisions at all. The focus is not anymore on committing the organisation synchronously as a whole, but on growing information in such a way that it remains operative.

The organisation is not anymore an anthropomorphic extension of the leader, implementing the local time of her own consciousness, it becomes an organic entity with no pre-defined centre, and no requirement for synchronous consistency.

This is what makes SCM, hence software tools, necessary.

Reducing people to the role they might play in an architectonic organisation is counterproductive. It can only produce non operative noise. People are peers in the production and maintenance of the information base.