Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Okay, good. You have a change management practice in place. You know how to define it, its benefits, how to get the process started, and how to measure its success. You also know it makes for greater success for business initiatives, it prepares the organization for the future, and drives consistency. But how can your current change management practice be improved upon? No matter if you’re a change requestor or change manager, the improvement of your current practice depends on these four actions.

Over the past two decades, two trends have completely reshaped the IT landscape: cloud computing and microservices. With cloud computing, organizations of all sizes can provision infrastructure and run applications on a global scale within minutes. And with microservices, these organizations can deploy highly scalable distributed workloads just as quickly.

The movies are filthy with examples of artificial intelligence. Some, like the first Terminator, are evil. Some, like the Star Wars droids, work for the good guys. And so many of them are flatly iconic—Blade Runner (both of them), 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Westworld (the movie and the HBO series), Matrix[i] … the list keeps going and going. We aren’t at the point yet when we can get R2 to talk the Millennium Falcon—or the data center—and find out what’s wrong.

From the Cloud First policy established in 2010 to last year’s Cloud Smart update, it’s clear the government is driving federal agencies toward cloud computing. The strategy makes sense, but for agencies migrating, however, the decision is less clear cut, because there are several options agencies can choose based on individual agency needs.

It’s a day for celebration! Our migration is complete, and our applications are now running in the cloud environment best suited to their needs. The rest of our application inventory, the ones not cut out for the cloud, remain on-premises where they belong. Actually…we’re not done yet. We still have some work to do to make sure our hybrid environment runs smoothly and delivers the business value we expect. Fortunately, we aren’t the first ones to travel this path.

The global effect of and challenges to business in 2020 is the very definition of “unprecedented.” While large enterprises enjoy the advantage of scale to redistribute focus and sustain demand for their goods and services, small- to medium-sized businesses may not be as lucky. For example, your favorite restaurants and retail shops, both local and national chains, have been hit in previously inconceivable ways, and are doing everything in their power to survive.

For some, change is something to look forward to. For others, it may be scary and anxiety-inducing. If the latter describes your organization, it may be time to rethink your change management practice. Changes are necessary in ITSM. Whether standard or an emergency, if IT changes are not successful, the business could suffer in the long run. Performing changes allows IT pros and business leaders to be proactive when risks arise to minimize disruption and keep employees engaged in the work that counts.