Please include your name, company name, mailing address, and specifics about your environment. It's a very simple word with many different meanings and understandings. In the context of Y2K projects it means having a complete, objective, end to end, and accurate, easily accessible, up to date roadmap of the systems in your software portfolio. Inventorying is a continual process since portions of your portfolio are under constant change. Only with a complete inventory is it possible to understand and comprehend impact.
Impact is the knowledge derived from all the inter-relationships within the inventory.
Eighty percent of the value of an inventory is derived from the understanding of the inter-relationships between the components of the inventory with only twenty percent of the value coming from the content of the components themselves. Likewise, the work ratio to capture the required information on a component is only about twenty percent against the eighty percent effort it takes to capture all inter-relationships of the component. Only with inventory and impact is it then possible to manage mass changes. The key element here is to be able to define the groups and determine the impact at a fine level of granularity within the groups and at a course level across the groups. Missing components are highlighted.