Availability Guide for Change Management

Introduction to Change Management
Availability Guide for Change Management–125506
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Increasing Availability by Effectively Managing
Change
Offering services around the clock requires computer and network services that are
available all the time. The cost of downtime, even a few minutes, can be dramatic in lost
revenue, lost consumer confidence, and lost productivity. The following are some
examples of lost revenue caused by computer downtime:
•
When an airline’s reservation system went down, thousands of travel agents had to
book flights manually. The estimated revenue impact from lost reservations (or
reservations made with other airlines) amounted to $36,000 per minute.
•
After a bomb exploded in the New York World Trade Center in 1993, one of the
Japanese banks in the building estimated lost revenues of $20,000,000 per day, or
$2,500 per minute.
Lost consumer confidence, while more difficult to assess than lost revenue during a
specific outage, can also cause revenue reductions over time because of damage to
reputation. Finally, lost productivity, management dissatisfaction, and overtime costs
can be even more costly than lost revenue.
Increasing Availability by Effectively Managing Change
As businesses attempt to provide services around the clock, being able to change
systems and applications with minimal or no impact on end-user availability is
becoming increasingly important. The following subsection explains how you can
maximize system and application availability by effectively managing change.
What Is Change Management?
Change management is the process of managing the maintenance and growth of your
NonStop system. Change management involves managing all hardware, software, and
procedural changes and includes all of the tasks required to properly manage change
within the operations environment.
Major change-management tasks include:
•
Anticipating and planning for change
•
Controlling the introduction of change
•
Installing and implementing changes to system software and hardware, application
subsystems, communications subsystems, and application software
Anticipating and Planning for Change
Anticipating and planning for change is a key requirement for maintaining 24-hour-a-
day, 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year operations. You can anticipate and plan for change
by:
•
Evaluating system performance and growth
•
Providing adequate computer room resources
•
Configuring your system with change in mind