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Hey Nicole Kiddman is here!!!

What is she doing in an change management class?

Don’t know maybe the movie business doesn’t pay that well anymore

Apparently her marriage consellor sent her here

Hmm… and why would that be
Tom and she need to reconcile their differences

Add comment November 9th, 2006

Automation and Cascading Changes

I was with a CIO for a large public utility, where several of the IT systems control real world infrastructure. He made a very interesting point — universally what people in IT are doing to reduce cost is to automate all the manual tasks. While this seems the correct way of doing things, one of the big dangers of this is cascading changes is causing cascading failures.

Pre-automation there were several manual steps which inherently created barriers for the failures to cascade and also in some sense partitioned the infrastructure. Several examples came out

• Active Directory/DNS: since the directory auto-replicates, if you make a mistake it propogates relatively quickly
• Production and Disaster Recovery: auto-sync between these two can bring down both
• Network: this is the classic because routing changes propogate quickly
• Any clustering solution

We had an interesting discussion about what to do in this case. Clearly you want automation, introducing a human in the loop is not an option in many cases. But how do you solve this problem?

One of our colleagues at a large minufacturing facility had solved this problem in an interesting way. He took one node in a cluster or active directory and used to keep it disconnected!!! and the manually connect it once in a while.

That was very interesting because he had figured out a way to technically enforce a change window which opened by him connecting and dis-connecting to the network.

Add comment November 9th, 2006

In search of a change management system (Part II)

After hunting for vendor independent material (see Part I) it was time to look at the vendor material. So I typed in “change management” into google and scan through the sponsored links … the following seemed relevant

• IBM Rational: the link takes us to Clear Case which is a source code management system.
  
• Sunview Software: lets you define workflows for different change types and then users to use them
• www.seapine.com/SCM: development tool to streamline software development
• www.bmc.com leads to a form which leads to a link to a whitepaper again about defining the business process and keeping track of a change request/project as it completes various phases
• www.Pega.com seems to be process definition and automation
• Solidcore: track and enforce changes on systems
• Opsware: provisioning system to push out new software to endpoints
• MetricsStream: quality management process

I refined the search to IT Change Management and the following other companies showed up:

• nLayers (EMC): application discovery and mapping tool for cmdb

Okay, so if you were looking for change management you could buy a software development system, process automation/ticket system, provisioning system, change tracking and enforcement, discovery and mapping tool. There seems to be no relationship between them but their marketing messages seem identical: conrol change, follow process, increase performance, be compliant … blah blah blah

So which one makes sense? (to be continued …. in part III)

Add comment November 9th, 2006