Configuration management (CM) is a field of management that focuses on establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance and its functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.

For information assurance, CM can be defined as the management of security features and assurances through control of changes made to hardware, software, firmware, documentation, test, test fixtures, and test documentation throughout the life cycle of an information system.

Configuration management was first developed by the United States Department of Defence in the 1950s as a technical management discipline. The concepts have been widely adopted by numerous technical management models, including System Engineering, Integrated Logistics Support, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), ISO 9000, Prince2 Project Management Methodology, COBIT, Information Technology, Infrastructure Library, Product Lifecycle Management, and Application Lifecycle Management  (ITIL).

Traditionally configuration management has four elements:

• Configuration identification - the process of identifying the attributes that define every aspect of a configuration item, that is, product (hardware and/or software) that has an end-user purpose. These attributes are recorded in configuration documentation and baselined. Baselining an attribute forces formal configuration change control processes to be effected in the event that these attributes are changed.

• Configuration change control - a set of processes and approval stages required to change a configuration item's attributes and to re-baseline them.

• Configuration status accounting - the ability to record and report on the configuration baselines associated with each configuration item at any moment of time.

• Configuration audits that are broken into functional and physical configuration audits. They occur either at delivery or at the moment of effecting the change.

Configuration management is widely used by many military organizations to manage the technical aspects of any complex systems, such as weapon systems, vehicles, and information systems. The discipline combines the capability aspects that these systems provide an organization with the issues of management of change to these systems over time.

Outside of the military, CM is equally appropriate to a wide range of fields and industry and commercial sectors. In Software Engineering, software configuration management (SCM) is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. Configuration management practices include revision control and the establishment of baselines.