The document discusses the challenges of managing IT changes amidst increasing complexities and risks, noting that most outages by 2015 will stem from people and process issues. It critiques traditional tools like CMDBs and change boards for being ineffective and highlights the need for a more agile approach that provides comprehensive dependency information, visual impact assessments, and proactive expert engagement. The proposed solution emphasizes a collaborative approach that leverages collective knowledge and prioritizes real-time analysis of risk and impacts to streamline the change process.

1. Improving Change Impact Analysis
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2. The pace of change in IT is greater
than its ever been
 Business demands
 Self-imposed by IT (performance,
reliability, security, etc.)
The One Constant in IT – is Change!
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With any change comes risk, and as IT environment
complexity has grown, it’s become increasingly
difficult for any one individual or team to fully
understand potential risks
Well intentioned changes without full understanding
of the ripple effects results in far too many IT issues
“Through 2015, 80% of outages impacting
mission-critical services will be caused by
people and process issues, and more than
50% of those outages will be caused by
change/configuration/release integration
and hand-off issues.”
R. Colville and G. Spafford,
"Top Seven Considerations for Configuration Management
for Virtual and Cloud Infrastructures”, 27 October 2010

3. First Time Change Success Rate
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4. Infrastructure Change Frequency
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5. Application Change Frequency
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6. Incidents (Unplanned Work) from Changes
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7. In Our Experience…
• We have seen many different
approaches to address change velocity
 CMDBs and Discovery tools in an effort to
better understand dependencies and
relationships to predict potential impacts
 Heavy process workflows and change
advisory committees in an effort to ensure
everyone has provided their input
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CMDBs, Discovery Tools, and Change
Boards Aren’t Working
• CMDBs and discovery tools don’t
include all of your critical
dependency information (they just
handle configuration data)
• CMDBs are often inaccurate and
untrusted by the people who are
supposed to use them
• CMDB impact analysis and
visualizations are hierarchical
constraining risk analysis and
missing potential risks
• CMDBs don’t proactively identify
relevant experts and require
change planners to guess who to
involve
• Change Boards meet irregularly
and often lack the risk assessments
necessary to make decisions
causing further delays

8. Change Agility With Stability
① Deliver all critical dependency information in
context of the change being planned
 Including policies, tribal knowledge,
automations, key settings, and more – not just
configuration data
② Provide rich visualization of potential
upstream and downstream impacts
③ Proactively identify and engage the right
experts to give their risk assessment –
arming them with 100% of what they need
④ Streamline and virtualize approvals to
accelerate change velocity
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“I’ve been using manual change
management approaches and ITIL
processes for twenty years and
found ITinvolve’s approach to be
fresh with an appealing SaaS model
that helped us get up and running
fast and cost effectively.”
-- Dave Colesante,
SVP, Product Development and CTO

9. Visually Assess Risk
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Understand relationships and dependencies
between requirements, applications, infrastructure,
automations, policies and people in real-time from
any perspective

10. Review Relevant Impact Factors
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Proactively provide decision makers with fragile
settings and other critical impact information

11. The IT Agility Application:
 Built around people and their interactions
where cross-functional teams work
together on their daily tasks
 IT’s collective knowledge (both systems-
based and tribal)
 Robust analysis of risk and impact that’s
highly visual
 Proactive engagement of the right experts
(including business stakeholders)
How We Solve These Challenges
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