of human and other resources and can be minimized or eliminated using CM. History Configuration Management originated in the United States Department of Defense in the 1950s as a technical management discipline for hardware material items—and it is now a standard practice in virtually every industry. The CM process became its own technical discipline sometime in the late 1960s when the DoD developed a series of military standards called the "480 series" (i.e., MIL-STD-480, MIL-STD-481 and MIL-STD-483) that were subsequently issued in the 1970s. In 1991, the "480 series" was consolidated into a single standard known as the MIL–STD–973 that was then replaced by MIL–HDBK–61 pursuant to a general DoD goal that reduced the number of military standards in favor of industry technical standards supported by standards developing organizations (SDO). This marked the beginning of what has now evolved into the most widely distributed and accepted standard on CM, ANSI–EIA–649–1998. Now widely adopted by numerous organizations and agencies, the CM discipline's concepts include systems engineering (SE), Integrated Logistics Support (ILS), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), ISO 9000, Prince2 project management method, COBIT, ITIL, product lifecycle management, and Application Lifecycle Management. Many of these functions and models have redefined CM from its traditional holistic approach to technical management. Some treat CM as being similar to a librarian activity, and break out change control or change management as a separate or stand alone discipline. Overview CM is the practice of handling changes systematically so that a system maintains its integrity over time. CM implements the policies, procedures, techniques, and tools that manage, evaluate proposed changes, track the status of changes, and maintain an inventory of system and support documents as the system changes. CM programs and plans provide technical and administrative direction to the development and implementation of the procedures, functions, services, tools, processes, and resources required to successfully develop and support a complex system. During system development, CM allows program management to track requirements throughout the life-cycle through acceptance and operations and maintenance. As changes inevitably occur in the requirements and design, they must be approved and documented, creating an accurate record of the system status. Ideally the CM process is applied throughout the system lifecycle. Most professionals mix up or get confused with Asset management (AM, see also ISO/IEC 19770), where it inventories the assets on hand. The key difference between CM and AM is that the former does not