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The Change Control Gap major problem occurs. Even when detected there is no sustainable accountability mechanism. As a result, the process deteriorates Unwanted change to infrastructure is a leading cause of IT woes. over time and the gap widens.Service availability outages, increased compliance costs, and the overall time and effort devoted to chasing change are just a few The change control gap, in turn, creates an ROI gap for change of the many problems faced by IT operations every day. management implementations. Even if 80% of change goes through process, it is the 20% of the change eluding process In an effort to "get in front" of the change problem, many that keeps organizations from realizing much of their expected organizations have invested heavily in solutions such as the ROI. See Figure 1.change management components of BMC Remedy Service Management or BMC IT Service Management for Mid-sized 100%Businesses (formerly "Magic"). These are widely deployed, Exceptionsmarket-leading products that do a great job of automating the 80%process of managing change. So why do many organizations that have implemented these products fail to fully realize their Missingexpectations for control over change, and ultimately ROI? 60%ROIThe fact is that most change management implementations, 40%regardless of vendor, fail to bring all change under control. Invariably, there is a gap between what the change management process says is happening and the change that is actually 20%occurring across the IT infrastructure. This "Change Control Gap" is typically the result of process failure, not product failure. First of all, most processes are designed around the desired, AutomationROIand assumed change practices of the organization. They do Figure 1: Change management ROI not realized 80% of the timenot adequately consider actual change behavior, which is often largely unknown. This puts the process at odds with reality from the start. Secondly, the best process, even with a high-degree of automation, must be understood, socialized and religiously Closing the Gapfollowed by the entire organization in order to succeed. This is a very difficult achievement even for mature organizations. Finally, So is implementing a change management solution a waste of time most breakdowns to the process go undetected, at least until a and money? The answer is no. Change management solutions Enhance BMC Change Management with Closed-Loop Control
are absolutely necessary for the achievement of overall IT service Reconciling Changes with Change Management management goals. However, to fully meet expectations, a change Systemmanagement implementation needs an additional ingredient: Closed-loop control. Continuous change auditing creates a complete database of detailed change events. Change validation matches groups Organizations that recognize the need to close the loop on their of changes in the database to corresponding approved and change management processes often assume the answer is implemented requests for change (RFCs) in the Remedy system. additional process automation combined with periodic checks This is based on hostname or configuration item (CI), actual start on the state of the infrastructure. They attempt to link the change time, actual end time, and username. After reconciliation, the RFC management solution with a change provisioning or datacenter is updated with detailed information about the change that includes automation tool to close the loop between approval and the user who made the change, the CI/hostname that changed, deployment. They may also invest in a configuration management and a link to a detailed report of changes. This information is database (CMDB), which helps track the state of the infrastructure accessible from the Remedy Worklog field.and its internal dependencies. Both of these approaches have great value and are recommended practices for achieving ITIL maturity. However, they do not close the change control gap. Query for Open RFCChange still happens outside of the process and the CMDB, Match Changes to Open RFCChangeeven when fully implemented and fed by ... [download for more]
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