Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
June 17, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM U.S./ET (GMT-4)
Larry Bonfante, CIO of the U.S. Tennis Association, will discuss the skills and approaches that your rising IT leaders must learn to be effective in an executive capacity.
How to Handle Your New CEO: Managing Turnover at the Top
June 18, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)
Turbulent times have increased turnover at the top. Find out what Council CIOs have done to "break in" new CEOs—build relationships, set expectations, educate on the role of IT.
Mid-Market CIO Panel: Tips and Techniques for Improving Vendor Relationships
July 15, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)
We'll highlight relationship priorities and best practices identified in a Council study, and we'll interact with a CIO panel on the approaches they've used to improve strategic vendor partnerships.
Executive Competencies Assessment Tool
Assess Your Business Leadership Skills with the Council's new benchmarking tool. Rate yourself in change leadership, strategy, customer focus and more.
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All too often, a change made to a mission-critical server has devastating results on an enterprise. Even major companies experience downtime or data loss because of an ill-timed or poorly planned change. Take, for example, a DNS administrator who decides to clean up DNS, only to later find that critical services failed because they relied on an older server hostname. At another level, new regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (Sox), place a much higher burden on IT to ensure control and the ability to audit changes within the network.
Initiate a program to formalize the change management process within your organization.
Begin by identifying which elements within your IT infrastructure can best be served by change management. While it may be nice to say "everything," in reality, organizations generally restrict change management to critical infrastructure pieces, such as servers and network devices.
Next, create a process document that identifies how a change request should flow through your organization. For example, if a change is made to a critical healthcare application in a hospital, should the change be approved by the application's management committee? And how should this workflow be enforced?
To help automate change management, look for two types of applications: workflow and systems management.
The first, workflow, manages the approval, review and reporting process involved in change management. Workflow software can come in many forms, but most often it has the feel of a help desk ticketing system but with additional features. For example, Change Management Control from SLAM offers workflow for change management and provides for a good deal of control over the process. Even open-source products are capable of use within change management, including the RT help desk package.
The second, systems management, is software that can actually implement the change on a target system for you. These types of systems are available in both the Windows and Unix worlds. In Windows, a good example is Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), which allows you to implement changes for critical Windows-based operating systems and applications. However, SMS is limited in the scope of applications supported. For Linux and Unix, configuration engines such as cfengine provide a very powerful policy-driven mechanism for implementing change and also for ensuring that systems do not diverge from their expected state.