by Bryon D Beilman
Back in 2007, I wrote about The Value of Change Management as it relates to managing IT systems. Now, four years later, I still believe it is one of the most important processes for any IT team, yet one of the most poorly executed. As an IT consulting company, we are often brought in when companies are having reliability issues, or for one reason or another their IT has spiraled out of their control and they need help and fast. We label this our "Chaos to Clarity" service. It doesn't have to be chaos, but it may just be that the customer spends more time putting out fires than moving the business forward or it has become overly complex and unsupportable within the allocated budget.
Networks, applications and core infrastructure can be fun to design and we have seen very nice diagrams of the way it was set up and perhaps even support documents of how to manage the system or application. Most of the time, though, the documents are out of date, numerous changes were made and the person who made the changes is no longer around and the people around them do not recall why or how things were changed. Even after demystifying the environment and creating operational procedures for companies, we suddenly realize that the service or database was moved, and the operational procedures, monitoring and documents were never changed. This may happen because of overworked IT staff , or perhaps that implementing technology is much more fun than updating documents, but we consistently find that this one function is not done well and if it was done well, it would save them alot of time in the future.
CMDB, the Change Management DataBase was designed to help manage this process. It captures information about changes, incidents, availability, capacity and supports the ITIL operational model. If done well, it also helps automate and detect changes that happen and perhaps alert someone that a change has occurred so that processes can be updated.
There are many articles out there, however that write about how difficult it is to implement the commercial CMDB systems and many large corporations sometimes abandon it after they have spent alot of time and money on it. The Open source options can be just as difficult as it requires gluing lots of applications together and it is difficult to get that "single pane of glass" view for the state of the system or network.
Regardless of product, change management is a process and at it's core, it doesn't have to be difficult, it just needs to be done consistently.