ITIL CHANGE MANAGEMENT

ITIL Change Management

ITIL Change Management

Introduction

According to Wallace and Webber (2009), the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CTTA), an agency of the UK government, came to realize in the 1980s that without standardized practices, private sectors and government agencies were creating their own IT management practices which could easily sabotage the proper and quality delivery of IT services. As a result, the agency established the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which consists of practices and concepts for IT operations, Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), and Information Technology development. ITIL's provisions include tasks, procedures, and understandable checklists which can be tailored by any organization to fit its own individual needs. With its excellent practices regarding the provision of IT services, ITIL has now been adopted worldwide (Potgieter, Botha, & Lew, 2005).

However, changes may arise in ITIL as a result of the problems an organization faces in the process of seeking benefits such as cost reduction or service improvement. Bearing this in mind, ITIL change management is needed in order to ensure that the goals regarding standardization of methods and procedures for efficiency and promptness in handling all changes are met, thereby reducing the effects of change-related incidents on service quality and improving the organization's operations (Blokdijk, 2008). In order to realize change management, management techniques for IT change control involving change orders/requests for configuration items must be applied (Aladwani, 2001).

Problem Statement

According to Vasanthi (2001), developments in computers, microelectronics, and communication technologies have radically changed the ways in which organizations operate. As you all probably know, ITIL talks about three types of change request or change order - normal, standard and emergency changes. The ITIL Change Management process embraces a long range of workflow typically comprised of drafting and registering/ recording the Change Request (usually known as RFC), reviewing the change, assessing the risk and impact of proposed change, its approval cycles with change authorization, planning, coordinating and implementing the change, communicating /reporting the stake-holders, performing the post-implementation review and, finally, closing of the RFC. The Change Advisory Board (CAB) plays the important role in ITIL model as the nodal authorization body, which examines the change proposals, approves and authorizes the change. For emergency change, ITIL v3 recommends Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB), a slimmer authorization body for quick emergency assessment and decision.

A need for all of the following factors has contributed to a paradigm shift towards adopting innovation: to effectively respond to customers' changing business needs while simultaneously maximizing value; to reduce cost/incidences, disruptions, and the need for reworking; to respond to business and IT requests for change and speed; and to increase the number of customers.

Cater-Steel, Tan, and Toleman (2006a) stated that most organizations must face the problem of poorly executed changes. For instance, if an organization provides poor IT training or introduces new software with which users are unfamiliar, the organization must focus on incident management (that is to say, on dealing with an incident which has already taken ...