At one time, all the business applications critical to the enterprise resided on mainframes in the data center. The IT professional could protect the essential business computing resources by adhering to a few simple precautions. The goal of these precautions: ensure that critical computing services could be reproduced in a reasonable time frame with little or no data loss. The techniques used to realize this goal in an organization are referred to as Disaster Recovery Planning or Business Continuity Planning. Today DRP and BCP must evolve to meet the ever-increasing complexity of tracking digital assets in a modern computing environment.

Enterprise Change Management (ECM) is a business process that manages and provides an audit trail of the revisions and status of all the digital assets. The digital assets managed by ECM are termed Configuration Items or CIs. The purpose of ECM is to identify, control, document and verify each CI in the infrastructure. The repository where the data associated with the ECM process resides is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). In the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, change management is responsible for controlling change to all configuration items in the configuration management database, or "CIs" in the CMDB.

Phases of ECM Activation

The first phase of ECM activation is to identify what technologies enable the business services being provided. The description of the CIs – and especially of their relationships to one another – facilitates an understanding of the technological components of each service. In other words, this step maps business services to underlying technologies. The information provides the building blocks of a CMDB design and the technological pieces of a business continuity plan. It feeds business continuity planning by providing information critical to availability planning.

Alignment ensures that underlying technologies are managed to consistency with Service Level Agreements (SLA). It determines the procedural requirements that must be in place in order for the above-identified components to meet business needs. For example, imagine an application, a Web server, which is part of a larger service that is expected to be available 24x7. The Web server depends on a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server to perform user authentications. Let’s further imagine that the LDAP server and the Web server are managed by different departments. Both departments have to be subject to the same SLA and must be able to work together to recover from a service disruption. A simple CMDB will provide at least enough information to enable the coordination of the different departments needed to respond to an interruption.

Institutionalization of ECM is the propagation of standard techniques and best practices across the enterprise. The goal is to utilize common tools, management strategies, measurements of performance and channels of communication. These benefits are especially relevant to complex business services that are composed of multiple applications running on multiple platforms. With ECM, no aspect of critical infrastructure is changed before evaluating the risks associated with that change.

The final stage, optimization, facilitates process refinement and automation. An optimized ECM process should enable the IT organization to cost-effectively respond to changing business needs. This derives from the fact that ECM – while an IT process – is not an IT-driven model. Indeed, it is a business-driven model. The identification of necessary business processes must ensure that business needs are met in the form of email to clients, transactions from customers and communication to employees. It is only through defining the business-facing requirements to the IT organization that any Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity plan may be put into place.

Configuration Management, Inc. (www.cmi.com) is a leading provider of Enterprise Change Management and Software Configuration Management® services. For more information please contact us at: 800-550-5058 or 732-450-1100.