Impacts
Info-Tech research shows that IT leaders describe infrastructure change gone wrong as a leading cause of their worst IT service outages. This is not surprising given the relative youth of complex IT infrastructure architecture compared to the relative maturity of application development and implementation processes. Info-Tech surveyed 191 organizations requesting information about their service level management maturity. Respondents classified their change management process maturity as either “Informal” (non-existent, ad hoc or documented), “Defined” (Fully defined, documented and measured) or “Optimized” (Fully Defined, optimized and with a continuous improvement cycle). Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between change management process maturity and system outages caused by changes. The graph shows that the more optimized, or mature, the change management process is, the fewer outages caused by unplanned or failed changes are experienced.