When you put a new application release into production, and it brings your servers down despite prerollout testing, you know your best practices are begging for an overhaul. Such was the case at competitive-game provider WorldWinner, in Newton, Mass. Joe Bai, CIO and vice president of technology, describes the problems that prompted him to begin rethinking IT best practices and investigating next-generation change-management tools.

"I was here less than three weeks when we put a release out, and it didn't work. It wasn't that the new functionality wasn't appropriate or wasn't performing the way we expected. The Web servers didn't come back," Bai says.

It turned out the version of Apache running in the development and quality-assurance environments wasn't the same as the one for the production environment. "The new code base that went out was dependent on code and configuration parameters that weren't there."

The team had to roll back the release and find the discrepancies. "It probably cost us a quarter of a day's revenue," Bai recalls of the 2003 event.

The bigger problem was that such issues weren't unusual for WorldWinner at the time. "We had a number of releases that went out and required eight, 10 or 12 patches before we were happy enough with them to leave them up. That's just not the way we wanted to do things," Bai says.

Over the last two years, Bai transformed the IT department from fire-fighting architects, engineers and developers to a lean, agile group that keeps the site up, stocked with fresh features and anticipates application enhancements before marketing staff comes asking for them.