Poor change. Bad enough that people resist change, but, in IT, change is unjustly accused of causing problems and may be unable to defend itself of the charge. I'll explain.

I spoke with an IT exec from a retail organization recently about the absolute importance it places on the holiday shopping season. During this period of high transaction volume, his IT department has a critical responsibility to ensure system availability. The company's financial future depends on it.      

To prevent any IT changes from affecting this crucial two month window, the organization routinely implements a change freeze on ALL their systems from the middle of November until the middle of January. The freeze is in place to eliminate the potential for any IT change to introduce problems that could negatively affect business systems.

While a bit like using a jack hammer to crack a walnut, this drastic measure is the only way the organization can guarantee that IT will not introduce change that can result in diminished infrastructure performance and reduced profits. Such procedures are routinely employed in companies that freeze all changes to ensure problem-free month-end or year-end processing. 

These extreme measures would not be necessary if ITIL® change and configuration management processes and a configuration management database (CMDB) or, as I blogged, a configuration management system (CMS), were in place. Strong processes could mitigate risk associated with change. With relationships between IT infrastructure configuration items (CIs) captured in the CMDB or CMS, decisions as to what changes should and shouldn't be made can be based on reality, not the fear of the unknown.

Without change and configuration management processes in place, organizations cannot confidently predict the impact of change, nor defend a change that is blamed for the latest system hiccup. Change is guilty until proven innocent, but without a CMDB or CMS, proving innocence is difficult. By the time a change has been cleared of all wrongdoing, its name has been tarnished, a rash of emails about it have flown around the company, the damage to IT's reputation is done, and its time to look for another job.

ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.