How often has an application service level degradation or outage been caused by a change in IT? The answer is “too often.” While new technology trends such as virtualisation 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 IT Infrastructure Library’s (ITIL’s) change management best practices and technologies to help bring in a consistent process to ensure proper control measures are in place. The main goal is that key stakeholders such as IT managers, application owners, change managers and change advisory boards (CABs) can answer the question “what changed?”

Among many causes of disruption, some of the common challenges these change management stakeholders face include:

• 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 could 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, 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 with the rising demand to pay more attention to critical business transactions, which incorporates the end-users experience, emerging solutions such as Business Transaction Management (BTM) have become 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 transactions, penalty costs on SLAs, end-users impacted, business locations, transaction resource consumption and more): This analysis enables the CAB to better plan downtime and helps the IT manager prioritise 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 detecting transaction flows so that any IT component being measured and reported on is tied to the transactions it supports. 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 third party providers; helping IT managers quickly and proactively isolate the problem area from the distributed front-end to the mainframe backend.

Validation of changes: BTM enables IT practitioners to validate configurations and infrastructure changes by analysing results of quality assurance activities and load test to determine application behaviours and bottlenecks.

BTM provides a unique approach for IT service management to accurately view transaction flow across their IT infrastructure, while providing meaningful information on critical business transactions and end-user experience.

BTM also adds value as change management extends to configuration management, CMS/CMDB implementations, service level management and other processes. For example:

CMDB/CMS: BTM provides business context to the CMDB/CMS by adding insight into critical business transactions and their dependencies. This context shows where the changes in the infrastructure occurred and if they impact a critical business transaction, service or users. Moreover, BTM enables configuration managers assess configuration changes and see how they alter business transaction behaviours while making modifications.

Service Level Management: BTM ensures service levels are not affected by changes through assessing the change impact ahead of time. BTM can also alert the right people of potential impact before breaching any SLAs. This helps the stakeholders mitigate risks and avoid costly degradation or outage in service by making the right decisions.

BTM helps optimise the testing of application, infrastructure, and business usage changes. By adopting BTM it can eliminate the need to call expensive teams of specialists for emergency troubleshooting sessions to determine why customers cannot process their transactions, or why a partner’s portal has grown painfully slow. It is common for innovators who’ve made the move to BTM to experience seventy percent less unplanned downtime. It is also safe to say that with BTM as part of a change management discipline, IT Managers are in a much better position to embrace initiatives such as virtualisation and cloud computing.

In short, including BTM as part of the change management process allows IT service providers to focus on what’s crucial to the bottom-line—critical business transactions and the end-user experience. As such, this helps IT managers and the CAB:

• Mitigate risks of impacting revenue generating transactions and customer satisfaction
• Make better decisions on change requests and better maintenance planning based on factual analysis instead of risky gut feel
• Improve productivity of IT personnel and the effectiveness of IT.

BTM brings important insight to change management that will help IT safely and cost-effectively manage changes—all in the context of the business priorities.

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