Throwing a Wrench in an Already Complex Environment: Change

This is the second post in a series on The Perfect Storm for IT Operations. Check out the earlier post on complexity of systems.

The next factor in “The Perfect Storm” (that term is growing on you, isn’t it?) that we’d like to touch on is change. Companies view changes to their software infrastructure as the top cause of downtime for business critical applications.

We’ve found that 60% of organizations list changes in the operational environment (patches, new software, security changes, etc.) as the most significant cause of unplanned downtime. More to the point, an astonishing 25% of changes cause problems in production and one in ten changes end up being “rolled back” due to unforeseen impact.

This is bad news for IT Operations teams who are facing an expected increase in the number of requested changes due to business pressures. The questions is, with highly complex environments that are tightly coupled, how do you keep the increase in changes from eating you alive – either in terms of caused problems such as downtime or in terms of increased IT staff hours required to manage the impacts of changes?

This trend is confirmed by other research studies - including Aberdeen Group’s recent report which showed similar findings.

We’ll talk more about how companies can set themselves up to deal with changes, but here is a preview of some of recommended best practices recently listed in a searchCIO article.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed Under: Change Management