Just finished up a quickie assessment of change control for a long time client. You know, when we get invited to look at a company’s environment, there are always layers upon layers of people, processes, tools, organization, culture… and politics.

In this case, we were asked by one Senior Director to assess change controls in the enterprise, and we both knew full well that another Senior Director, reporting to a different VP, carrying the Governance title, is the one who owns “change”.

It made for some interesting interviews! Along the lines of “yes, I own this process, but that other person owns all the tools that allow this process to happen, and lots of other people are the ones actually doing the work.”

We in IT casually throw around terms like “Billy Bob owns the raised floor” and “Janie Sue owns the backup process for the Unix environments” and “Herman’s the admin for that particular server.”

But it’s not that simple. Billy Bob has to rely on the facilities department, the OS team(s), the network team, etc. Janie Sue relies on Billy Bob because that’s where her Unix servers and storage live. She also has to work with the various app and server admins, to get their data and apps backed up, failover tested, all that good stuff. And those people in turn deal with Billy Bob and lots of other process owners and internal service providers.

Now let’s take this very complicated, multilayered, partially (at best) undocumented situation… and plug it into a CMDB.

As you know, one of the commonly discused characteristics of a Configuration Item is… ownership. And ITIL include “process” and “documentation” as possible Configuration Items.

So which CI’s does Janie Sue own?

The tapes / tape drives / robots? Sure, tangible, physical things are easy.
Backup procedures, offsite policies? Yeah, I’m throwing softballs.

How about the contracts with the offsite storage vendor? Hmm.. might be a bit of discussion with the contracts / vendor management groups about that one.

How about the process of handling “restore” requests? The service desk can take the request (hopefully via web), but who does the work? In many shops, it’ll be one of Billy Bob’s people to pull the tape, bring it to Herman, who does the restore. Unless it’s the app owner or the database guys. But “restore process” is clearly a Janie Sue responsibility… even though nobody that reports to her may ever actually do any restore work.

Are you still with me? So how the heck are you going to build a cohesive, change-managed CI model that captures all of this stuff?

You’re not, of course. You’ll go where the ROI lives, which is in tracking the relatively easy stuff - physical assets, software, and the most important relationships so you can get beter pre-change impact assessments.

There’s plenty of really hard stuff just in that “easy” stuff - more on that later.

Happy Friday.

Scott Braden

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