Conquering the Challenges of Change Management
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Posted On :
Jan-19-2011
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Article Word Count :
513
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While new technology trends such as virtualization and cloud are adding entanglement to the world of managing IT services, routine changes made by administrators or IT managers to the infrastructure or applications also cause critical business impact. Emerging market segments such as Business Transaction Management (BTM) are becoming integral in the change management process
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"Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change"
How often has an application service level degradation or outage been caused by a change in IT operations? The answer is "too often." While new technology trends such as virtualization and cloud are adding entanglement to the world of managing IT services, routine changes made by administrators or IT managers to the infrastructure or applications also cause critical business impact. As change management continues to be a challenge in IT service management, many have adopted ITIL's change management best practices and technologies to help bring in a consistent process to ensure proper control measures are in place. The goal is that key stakeholders such as IT managers, change managers and change advisory boards (CABs) can answer the question "what changed?"
Among many causes, some of the common challenges these change management stakeholders face:
- They are unaware of the changes made in the environment.
- They lack the understanding of IT's impact on the critical business transactions and end-users.
- They inadequately test service quality.
And the list can go on. Regardless, the incidents and problems caused by changes result in expensive war room scenarios, IT credibility loss and, more importantly, impact on revenue.
What IT operation teams require to manage change effectively is a practical and sustainable, yet systematic, way to identify and model how changes will impact critical business transactions and the end-user's experience. Furthermore, the stakeholders need to have solid facts and meaningful information so they can better plan maintenance schedules and make more informed decisions on change requests.
As the IT industry continues to shift towards being more business-focused, and towards the rising need to pay more attention to critical business transactions and the end-users experience, emerging market segments such as Business Transaction Management (BTM) are becoming integral in the change management process. BTM provides change management stakeholders information such as:
- Business impact analysis (e.g. cost analysis such as cost of poor performing transactions, penalty costs on SLAs, end-users impacted, business locations and more): This analysis enables the CAB to better plan downtime and helps the operations team prioritize incident/problem resolution caused by a change.
- Automatic discovery of business transactions and the relationship between businesses services and their underlying IT components: This reduces time-to-value by quickly modeling transaction flows so that any IT component being measured and reported on is tied to a critical transaction. This ensures that resolution effort is not wasted in reacting to random alerts that may not be critical to the business.
- Visibility into every tier that the business transaction runs through, including cloud-based services and any 3rd party providers; helping IT operations quickly and proactively isolate the problem area from the distributed front-end to the mainframe backend.
BTM provides a unique approach for IT service management to accurately view, modeland test transaction flow across their IT infrastructure, while providing meaningful information on critical business transactions and end-user experience.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Conquering the Challenges of Change Management_49159.aspx
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Author Resource :
Linh C. Ho is a Product Marketing Director at OpTier and the author of this article on IT Management Software and the use of BTM software.
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Keywords :
change management, business management, transaction monitoring, it management, software, complex events processing change man,
Category :
Business
:
Management
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