* Change management’s increasing role
Now that the economy appears to be recovering, change management is becoming increasingly important as a discipline central to service management, configuration management databases, IT organizational maturity, and IT governance.
Change management is a challenge for organizations of all sizes. The impact of improperly managed change can be significant and tends to be very visible. Imagine the impact of putting a new version of your company’s core order-processing software in place without adequate testing. Or changing the configuration of several key routers only to find that you used incorrect configuration settings and now several of them are disabled. The results of these types of changes, and many that are not as far-reaching, can halt productivity across your enterprise. They can affect revenue generation, employee productivity and morale, the political standing of IT in the larger organization, and most importantly the service quality experienced by customers and partners.
The idea of managing change effectively goes way back to the early history of IT, but the processes and tool sets needed have been slow to mature. Today, there are several drivers that are raising change management to a higher priority for IT.
One of these drivers is most certainly regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbanes-Oxley, though primarily finance-oriented, draws IT into the fold as a supporting organization. It puts in place new requirements for IT control and documentation and does so with some specific deadlines and accountability measures. These requirements are daunting, but change management is one way to begin to address this legislation through formalized processes and automation.
Managing change essentially means having a solid understanding of your IT infrastructure and its configuration – both of which are needed for service-level management and business services management – combined with clear processes for managing changes.
Change management can be broken down into planned and unplanned changes. Planned changes and associated consequences such as those described above can easily be addressed and managed through a formalized change management process that takes into account change approval, testing, and deployment. One process model that is getting a great deal of attention (and adoption) is the set of recommendations for change and configuration management in the IT Infrastructure Library’s (ITIL) best practice guidelines. Plus, many IT shops that are simply developing their own processes for change management based on organizational needs. The specific approach is not so important – but the establishment of a process and tool sets to support it are critical.
Enterprise Management Associates is conducting a Web-based survey to understand the details of enterprise implementation of change management configuration management databases (CMDB). We know change management is getting a high priority. What we don’t know for sure is how IT shops are connecting the dots between services, the CMDB, change management processes, and automated change management products. This survey will drill down into those areas and more.
Please take a few minutes to participate – as always, we love to get your thoughts. There is a $25 Amazon gift certificate being offered to the first 100 participants. The survey can be found at:
https://www.emausa.com/surveys/change_survey.htm
