RESUMEN

Information technology systems permeate organizations, supporting almost everything--apart from managing IT items themselves. Although software-configuration-management systems can provide some management assistance, they aren’t designed to handle the totality of a distributed enterprise or to act as a management information resource. Software sources constitute major organization assets, but they can’t be treated as such until they're inventoried. Software inventorying is one of a set of integrated technologies developed to address problems of managing constantly changing technological and business processes. Those technologies are aspects of an evolving business paradigm called the paradigm of change. Creating an enterprise IT inventory is a complex task requiring large amounts of information, but such an investment can produce considerable payoff.