It’s not what you change – it’s how you change that counts
07 November 2006

Daniel Laws of Kelway on how IT change management is critical to business success.

Surprisingly, it’s not the hardware or software you invest in that will influence the future performance of your IT department: it’s the change and management controls you have in place. According to research from the IT Process Institute (ITPI) and Gartner, 80% of IT system failures are down to internal IT changes rather than external factors.

If it sounds crazy, an IT solutions provider talking about the internal systems of companies rather than their IT systems, it’s not. At Kelway, we believe that our clients should benefit from IT. The right solution should deliver real business advantages and increase ROI while decreasing TCO.

The ITPI research was conducted in light of the increasing importance companies are placing in ITIL and COBIT best practices. More acronyms – apologies but you’ll see the need in a moment or two.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is an industry-leading set of IT Service Management best practices. COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) is an IT governance framework that allows managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks.

Both ITIL and COBIT have become more important in the last four years thanks to pressure from government regulators and company boardrooms to comply with corporate governance laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

In brief, companies need to have controls over the services IT provides, and the ITPI study found that change management controls have the biggest impact.

With such controls in place – enforcing IT ‘change windows’ for administrators, and only allowing authorised staff to make configuration changes, for example – IT departments can have a first-fix rate 56% better than low performers, whilst supporting five times more servers per system administrator. Similar research from Gartner went further and suggested that 80% of system failures were caused by internal IT management issues rather than external threats.

So the conclusion is that IT can be good for you and your company. But think about those change and management controls, because they too can make a real difference.

Contact us to find out more about IT change management >>