"A lot of developers have access to the production environment, and they may want to change something they believe is basic, like a data file, so they don't bother to open a change ticket. Then the next time someone needs to make an authorized change, they have the wrong information about the configuration," says Stephen Wrenn, senior director of IT service management at Liberty Mutual. "In many companies, 50 percent to 60 percent of outages are caused by changes."

Wrenn's team has just started using MAM to run comparisons between change tickets and actual changes to more than 40 applications. Prior to using a mapping tool, he says, his company relied on manual diagrams based on staff knowledge of the systems. Identifying Requirements

Organizations often have multiple needs for a mapping tool. Boise State University is expanding its use of nLayer software into two additional areas: monitoring application access and traffic over the network, and tracking software license usage.

ING Investment Management, an international banking and asset management company with U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, is leveraging mapping information for three key uses. The mapping data is used by the company's IT architects, help desk support staff and operational IT staff to troubleshoot major systems, says Vincent Moriarty, assistant vice president of technology management. ING has a primarily Windows-based environment. It gathers software and hardware configuration data via Microsoft Corp.'s Systems Management Server (SMS) and feeds it via custom automated interfaces into Infra Corp.'s help desk application and Telelogic's System Architect modeling tool. System Architect enhances the data from SMS using its own templates to add descriptive information on application and database relationships, says Moriarty.

"By getting information on the applications that we have, and on the relationships between them, we're able to understand how a new vendor package might fit into that environment," he says. ING uses the mapping information with System Architect to model about two-dozen software initiatives annually, says Moriarty.