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 »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
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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.