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 A Comprehensive Approach toPracticing ITIL Change Management
 A White Paper Prepared for BMC SoftwareNovember 2008 
 
 A Comprehensive Approach toPracticing ITIL Change Management
Page 
©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Executive Summary 
Batch processing is a critical part of most enterprises. Itis a foundation technology for applications including e-commerce, accounting, stock and inventory control, en-terprise resource planning, customer service, and many more. Any disruption to mission-critical batch process-ing can cause extensive impact to the business throughdowntime, lost revenue, contract penalties, and more.However, change management processes, even thosebased on recognized best practices such as ITIL, rarely take into account the batch environment when planning for change. Systems are shut down, removed, rebuilt,and updated without any concern for the impact suchchanges may have on critical batch processing, and thebusiness services that depend on it. An emerging solution for this problem is to inte-
grate batch service denitions into a Conguration
Management Database, or CMDB. In ITIL best prac-tices, the CMDB serves as “a single source of truth”
for recording the conguration of devices, operating 
systems, databases, middleware, applications, etc. Thisprovides (among many other things) a single point of reference to determine the scope and impact of any change to any IT system throughout the enterprise.
Integrating batch process denitions with the CMDB
extends this single source of truth to include mission-critical batch services also. This ensures the assessmentof the scope and impact of any change can now betruly universal.BMC Software is providing a solution to this require-ment, by integrating their batch process automation so-lution, BMC CONTROL-M, with their CMDB solution,BMC Atrium. This innovative solution based on ITILbest practices directly addresses the problems of inte-grating change management and batch processing. BMCSoftware’s solution discovers batch services, recordsthem in unique records in the CMDB, associates them
 with other enterprise conguration elements, forecasts
the impact of change on batch processing, and correlatesthat impact with business services, thereby predicting thefull impact of any change on business users. The result is a more effective change managementprocess based on best practice recommendations thataccommodates all mission-critical business services, re-ducing unexpected downtime, improving availability, andreducing the cost of change. Enterprise Management
 Associates believes this solution will provide signicantbenets to many enterprises, especially those with an
existing CMDB implementation
The Problem
Mission-critical data processing relies in large part onthe automated initiation, execution, management,integration, and recovery of batch-mode IT process-ing—scripts, jobs, tasks, and other non-interactive IT
processes that manipulate a specic data set. These
processes may be application-oriented, such as account-ing, payments, e-commerce, supply chain management,
ERP, purchasing, ordering, fulllment or data mining;
or system-oriented, such as data backup, grid and clustersupport, virtual load balancing, storage management, ordata export-transform-load operations. Batch process-ing in a modern enterprise is a foundation technology for many critical business services, so it is imperative tomaintain consistent and reliable batch processing.
 At the same time, change is inevitable and protable
businesses demand almost continual change, so they can provide new products and services, build com-petitive advantage, and continually improve customerservice. Without change, a business will stagnate, andinevitably be overtaken by its competitors. However, with change comes risk, and the potential for problems.
EMA estimates, for example, that faulty conguration
changes are responsible for around 60% of downtimein an average enterprise.It is therefore important to establish practices and pro-cedures for change management that account for the ef-fect of changes on systems, applications, and especially business services. With change management, changecontrol, and application and infrastructure mapping tools, this can be a relatively simple and standardizedprocess. However, these tools invariably do not accountfor batch processing, leaving many critical business ser- vices vulnerable to unexpected outages. It takes a deepunderstanding of the batch processes, and their often
complex interdependencies, to ensure that conguration
changes do not adversely affect the batch environment.For example, if IT needs to move a system to put it intoa new virtual server, or upgrade the physical server, itis relatively easy to predict and minimize the impact on
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