The Current State of IT Change

IT change and configuration management is a must in today’s business world if a company wants to succeed, and continue to succeed, as IT becomes more complex and more important to everyday business operations. IT change is inevitable, it happens within every organization. To ensure continued alignment of IT and business operations, organizations must continuously make IT changes to meet the demands of both workers and clients. In most organizations, this is both costly and time consuming. To stay up to date a company has to manage complex IT changes such as installing patches, provisioning new servers, and managing tricky compliance. This is riskier than one may think. With no in-depth IT change management policy or framework in place, a company is forced to rely on manual change. Human error in IT change management can cause business interruption and revenue loss because of high amounts of unnecessary downtime.

A common scenario today is

  • Infrastructure groups manage change
  • Collisions occur, service is interrupted
  • Business is interrupted, users become frustrated
  • Revenue is lost
  • CIOs are held responsible but cannot fix the root of the cause

Many companies are stuck with existing IT change management policies which generally follow the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) change framework. The ITIL change framework takes a basic approach to IT change management by following a set of general guidelines to address complex changes. For a company to have successful IT change management, they must get beyond ITIL. ITIL change framework without the additions of consistent processes, governance, configuration management, and ways to centrally report and track changes, leaves a company with too much downtime, high costs, and lost revenue.

Challenges For All

CIO

  • High costs of IT operations due to the need for constant reaction to failed change and the lack of automation
  • Lack of service availability to the business which is often unexplainable and unavoidable
  • Without reliable and accurate audit capabilities, the risk of being out of compliance is high

Change Advisory Board

  •  The ability to make critical decisions and approvals is complicated by a lack of reliable data
  • Review and audit of the process itself is difficult due to the lack of audit data
  • Accountability to the business is increasing but the ability to provide accurate feedback is not

The Business

  • IT services increase in criticality, complexity and cost while also decreasing in reliability
  • Service interruptions occur due to planned and or uncontrolled change

IT Operations - Implementers

  • Demand for change implementations increase but staff does not
  • Implementations are prone to human error
  • Faced with the constant threat of outsourced labor

Application Managers

  • Release management process is disconnected from operational change which results in failed change

 

Want to learn more?

Watch one of our webinars on change management by Shannon Lake, Director of Client Solutions