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What is the Importance of Change Management?
Need
to understand the importance of change management and want practical
standards and best practices for information management governance and
accountability?
The change management process provides
a disciplined process for
introducing changes into the production environment with minimal
disruption to ongoing operations.
It should:
- Provide an authorization
and tracking
processes to ensure only approved changes are deployed;
- Require a configuration
management process to
assess the impact of change on all potential configuration items (CI);
- Require release
management to package the
changes for successful deployment with minimal disruption to production.
What is the importance of change management?
Change
is defined as anything—hardware,
software, system components, services,
documents, or processes—that is deliberately introduced
into the
production environment and which may affect a service
level agreement
(SLA) or otherwise affect the functioning of the environment or one of
its components.
All changes falling under this definition should be addressed by the
managing change management process as changes may:
- Affect multiple
users;
- Potentially disrupt business-critical
services;
- Involve hardware
(such as servers or networking
equipment) or software
modifications;
- Affect data
stored and hence the data
management, data movement and data presentation environments; and
- Involve operational and process
modifications
that affect multiple users.
What happens if we don't have a change management process?
Information management is so critical to the ongoing operation of a
that it is impossible to predict the impact of not adhering to a
disciplined change management process. Issues can occur with:
- Data
storage, e.g. database changes are introduced that cause applications
to fail. Lack of a clearly defined change management process makes it
difficult for the production support team to troubleshoot and resolve
the issue-Much "down-time" can be anticipated;
- Data movement e.g. information
continuity may be compromised e.g. a change request might require
changing a data feed into a data warehouse. The impact analysis did not
identify that this feed is required to update an external data target
on a monthly basis. After
three months of processing data, it is suddenly discovered, and, it is
also discovered that there is no way to recover the data;
- Security, e.g.
- New code might be introduced without adequate security testing thus allowing potential security breaches to occur; or
- New
data storage structures may be created but are not added to the
database back-up and restore procedure, or, are not tested, thus
leading to potential data loss in event of future failure;
- New
software may be added without updating the metadata repository,
resulting in erroneous or incomplete analysis for future projects; or
- New
processes may be added without considering metadata required for
operational monitoring thus resulting in an incomplete picture of daily
operations
- Data quality e.g.
- Data
feeds may be changed without consideration of data quality, this
causing processes to fail or causing significant increase in data
steward error reporting; or
- Data
feeds may be changed and everything processes OK except that the new
data is not sourced from a reliable system of record and business
analysis reporting/decision making is based on erroneous data.
- Documentation
e.g. changes may be introduced into production with out up-to-date
documentation thus causing misery for the production support team and
time loss responding to production operation incidents
- Configuration management, e.g.changes
may be introduced into production with out updating the configuration
management database thus creating future problems for production support
and change management impact analysis.
What is the solution?
The importance of change management cannot be stressed enough. it provides
a disciplined process for introducing changes into the production environment with minimal
disruption to ongoing operations.
Summary...
The change management process provides
a disciplined methodology for
introducing changes into the production environment with minimal
disruption to ongoing operations.
All stakeholders need to be aware of the importance of change management.
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