Managing all changes being made to an organizations applications and infrastructure environments can be a daunting task for many organizations. In today’s constantly evolving and changing business climate how does an organization balance the need for speed with the need for maintaining their reliability and stability in response to the demand for continuous operations.
Business desires to move at the speed of Google, so in today’s ever present, highly charged, competitive and rapidly changing business environment IT must move from change CONTROL to change ENABLEMENT.
Commerce Bank went from implementing changes at a minimum of every two weeks to 98% of their changes being implemented in 6 days or less. By streamlining the change control process Commerce Bank was able to deliver over 50,000 production changes to the business while reducing the number of high impact failures by 88% and meantime to repair (MTTR) by 78% over a period of 8 years. Commerce has been successful at creating a balanced approach, the need for speedy changes with the imperatives for continued stability and reliability. They went from being a business inhibitor to a business contributor. In the end it is all about business outcomes.
Building the culture, identifying key tools, refining processes and generating the focus necessary for creating the flexibility that allows an IT organization to be an enabler of business outcomes takes time. There are certain characteristics that the change process must develop and take on, that do not always at first appear to be natural when moving from a sense of having the need to control to one of enablement. There are lessons learned to share and a framework that is open to discussion and interpretation for each individual/organization to determine what will work best for them.
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