Integrity issues have been with us since the dawn of technology. Every modification to any of the characteristics of IT affects the configuration. Historically, these tasks have been manual, routine and acceptable. However, as the scale and complexity of the modern IT infrastructure grows, this laissez-faire attitude to integrity drift is no longer viable. In only the past five years, the enterprise network has become the backbone of the business. There is increasing reliance on enterprise networks to support mission-critical applications and service the needs of a business web of suppliers, vendors, partners, customers and employees. Thus, the integrity and quality of service of the IT production environment is emerging as the focal point of corporate good governance.

Fundamental to organisational development is a stable IT environment and it is here where integrity management plays an important role. It is evolving from proprietary tools to cross platform, multi-vendor business intelligence tools and has become an imperative for IT infrastructural stability, and business application delivery.

Nterprise Network Solutions believes that it is the emerging role of integrity management as a business process enabler that is key to the strategic positioning of our offering in the market. Integrity management needs to be 'taken out of the closet'. Attitudes to and opinions about integrity management are polarised between configuration management being the domain of equipment manufacturers, on the one hand, to integrity management being one of the many outcomes of ITIL, on the other.