Automating Change

At IT’s About Uptime, we have been recently blogging about the benefits of change management maturity to organizations. When an IT Operations Team is mature, the benefits include a smoother process, greater confidence in changes and fewer emergency changes. Any IT Operations Team would be happy to improve in these areas, especially given the pressure that they face to keep things running for the business.

One key way that companies can improve their maturity is to automate their change management process. Just the sheer numbers of changes that come at IT Operations teams on a daily or weekly basis makes automation for change management a wise choice.

Software development teams have a well established history of integrating automation into change processes with supporting tools. Unfortunately, the history on the IT Operations side of the house is not quite as distinguished in this area.

Why automate? We’ve found that companies with automated change management processes experience some significant benefits:

• Over 20% fewer problems from changes
• Almost 20% less staff required for change management
• Almost 10% greater confidence in changes

For larger businesses that make hundreds of changes a year, this indicates both a bottom line impact as well a confidence boost. Unfortunately, as the graph below shows, only half of companies automate their changes.

(As an aside, we have also seen that virtualization will introduce a larger number of changes to the organization. So, if the folks who predict trends are correct, the number of changes is going to increase very fast in the next year or two.)

Of course, it is important that you don’t automate without the appropriate testing and controls in place, but automation is a strong step for companies to take to become more mature about how they handle changes.

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Filed Under: Change Management