IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING

Executive Introduction

The importance of IT services to businesses is on the rise, as many companies and organizations are

discovering competitive advantage through automating manual processes and extending the reach of

business services through IT applications. The differences between IT services and business services

are in fact becoming increasingly blurred, while the more traditional role of IT in supporting business

productivity has also grown in importance.

Perhaps the single most pervasive challenge in capitalizing on this opportunity is managing change.

Change can arise from technology advances, cost-cutting and consolidation, mergers and acquisitions,

and a wide variety of shifting business concerns as more creative executives seek out new services, new

audiences, new partners, and even new, more efficient business models by leveraging IT services more

expansively. The stress of supporting these advances for IT organizations facing constrained resources

is obvious, and the cliché of “doing more with less” has never been more resonant than in the current

economic climate.

This white paper presents some perspectives on the most critical factors driving IT organizations to

find more effective ways of managing change. It will present some recommendations for planning suc-

cessful change management initiatives, including key technologies such as discovery and configuration

management. Finally, this report will introduce SunView’s ChangeGear solution, which provides a ver-

satile and functionally rich offering for addressing change management concerns with comparatively

minimal administrative overhead. Such a pragmatic approach is, Enterprise Management Associates

(EMA) believes, a refreshing alternative compared to many solutions that require extensive coded

customization and lengthy, costly deployments.

Environmental Conditions Requiring a More Efficient

Approach to Managing Change

As IT becomes a more integrated part of businesses and organizations across virtually all verticals, it

is also more vulnerable to shifting market and service demands. To some IT managers and executives,

this may seem like a lose-lose scenario. After all, why stick your neck out in supporting business or

organizational outreach when your budget is frozen or being cut, and when you will only get blamed

for failures if your services don’t meet expectations?

But in fact, such thinking is bound to be counterproductive sooner or later given the realities of a glob-

ally competitive marketplace, and the need to show value versus simply retreat into IT’s traditional role

as a cost-center shielded by its own, opaque complexity. This is true for IT organizations as a whole,

just as it’s also true for the groups within IT who may seek to hold on to a siloed approach to manag-

ing specific domains based more on tradition and habit than the growing requirements for delivering

cohesive services.

The need for accountability, transparency and visibility in IT operations is especially stringent in the require-

ments for managing change. A quick survey of some of the more significant challenges includes:

• Mergers and acquisitions – Consolidating data centers, for instance, involves far more than effective

optimization of HW and SW infrastructure and operational floor space. It will also demand

assimilation of new individuals and organizations into often newly defined processes, best practices

and procedures for working together.

Taking Control of Change: Optimizing Your Environment for More Effective IT Service Delivery

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Page 1

IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING

• Increasing demand for new services – While the qualitative shift of IT services towards more business-

contributive value has already been discussed, the quantitative push to provide more services faster,

more fluidly, and more resiliently is also forcing IT organizations to consider new, more effective

ways of managing and facilitating change. This is one of the drivers for the move to virtualization,

but it is also a driver for more effective processes supported and enforced through automation.

• Accelerating frequency of infrastructure changes – In parallel with applications, and in many respects

in response to them, infrastructure changes across systems and networks are orders of magnitude

more frequent than they were just five years ago. And of course, the move towards virtualization

is taking this to a new level altogether.

• Virtualization – While most may think of virtualization in terms of systems environments, it is in

actuality a multi-domain phenomenon – including networks, storage, applications, and desktops.

EMA data shows that virtualization can provide strong capex and opex benefits, as well as facilitate

more effective application provisioning. But virtualization requires more, not less, awareness

of infrastructure and application interdependencies, and superior tools for automating change

management and change control.

• Cloud Computing – Similarly Cloud computing is taking off

primarily in the “private Cloud,” or virtualized data center,

with public and community Cloud services trailing significantly

and many companies targeting hybrid “private” plus some

public Cloud services. EMA data shows that those vendors

with strong capabilities for managing change are categorically

more successful in assimilating Cloud services than those who

are less mature in change management.

EMA data shows that those

vendors with strong capabilities

for managing change are

categorically more successful

in assimilating Cloud services

than those who are less mature

in change management.

• Compliance, security, risk management – changing infrastructures

and application environments can often leave IT organizations

and the businesses they support open to increased security risks. Having an effective and

accountable set of processes – ideally enforced at least in part through automation – can deliver

striking advantages. For instance 94% of high performers in security and risk management were

committed to a well-defined approach to change management and control. (“IT Governance, Risk

and Compliance Management in the Real World,” EMA, May 2008). At the same time, audits can drive

extensive operational overhead if effective levels of automation are not in place – or else result in

millions of dollars in consultant fees just to save on penalties and minimize embarrassment. With

the array of industry-driven regulations, such as Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLBA) for banking and the

North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) for utilities, as well as government-driven

regulations (U.S. Patriot Act) and regulations that affect multiple industries such as PCI-DSS, the

challenges of keeping up with IT audits has become a minor industry in itself.

Taking Control of Change: Optimizing Your Environment for More Effective IT Service Delivery

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Page 2