In today’s dynamic IT environment, the pace of change due to technology upgrades has increased. Organizations need to ensure that the change management process is followed diligently. Hence, having automation in every change management step is critical toward ensuring a stable and reliable change process rollout across business functions as well as smooth transition of services with minimal disruption.
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) defines the best practices an organization needs to follow across all stages of the change management process. Based on risk levels and organization policies, the steps following in designing change management process will vary slightly. For instance, multi-level approvers at every stage of the production environment and non-production environment.
Injecting automation into the change management process
A typical change management process can have automation built-in using simple Run Book Automation/Robotic Process Automation to complex AI and predictive intelligence to minimize disruption during the change. An important aspect to be considered while bringing in automation is to start by looking at the standard changes that could be initiated at pre-defined schedules. These would be low risk and will have known documented procedures as compared to emergency changes or normal changes.
Below is a list of steps followed in the ITIL-defined change management process and areas that can be considered for automation:
Conclusion
Manual change management methods will not work in today's dynamic environments and it is not prudent to allow changes without following a process. Hence, every organization that is serious about maintaining security, compliance, and reliability of its IT infrastructure should automate the change management process with the best possible options before the demand for IT change overwhelms the current processes.
Shameeja Theruvath
Associate Consultant, Wipro HOLMES® Wipro
Shameeja is an experienced IT professional with expertise in creating Enterprise Automation Solutions. She has strong technical expertise in Infrastructure Consulting across Data Center Technologies. Shameeja currently works with Wipro HOLMES® team in designing solutions for Enterprise Automation for customers across business and IT for different industry segments.