The fourth capability area is that of Provisioning. It covers the group of activities for creating all or part of an environment in which an application system can run. This is a key capability for ensuring that application systems have the capacity they need to maintain performance and availability. It is also crucial for ensuring that development and test activities have the capacity they need to maintain THEIR performance. The variance with test teams is that a strong Provisioning capability also ensures that development and test teams can have clean dev/test environments that are very representative of prorduction environments and can very quickly refresh those dev/test environments as needed. The sub-capabilities here deal with managing the consistency of envionment configurations, and then quickly building environments to a known state.

Provisioning Capability Area

The fifth capability area is closely related to Provisioning. It is the notion of a System Registry capability. This set of capabilities deals with delivering the assumed infrastructure functions (e.g. DNS, e-mail relays, IP ranges, LDAP, etc.) that surround the environments. These capabilities must be managed in such a way that one or more changes to an application system can be added to a new or existing environment with out significant effort or disruption. In many ways this capability area is the fabric in which the others operate. It can also be tricky to get right because this capability area often spans multiple application systems.

System Registry Capability Area