November 29, 2006, 12:24 PM — Listen to the column Controlling change requests, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Change may be constant, as the saying promises, but tracking changes remains random in too many companies. Post-It notes on a technician's monitor, though handy, really aren't a change management system.
Enter SunView Software (.com) and their updated ChangeGear 2.0 change management reporting and SOX compliance tool. Yes, the SOX people care when you change parameters on a server, software application, or radio station. Well, maybe not the radio station yet, but give them time.
Dominic Martinelli went through a SOX compliance audit at a previous company, and refused to suffer the same frustration at Rackable Systems (rackable.com), the company he joined as VP of IT back in March. He manages 15 people in the IT department, and they watch over 25 or so production servers. With about 50 changes per week to ERP, CRM, and Oracle Financials, tracking requests, authorizations, and finished changes would be another audit nightmare without some help.
"ChangeGear creates change tickets, routes them to the right person for approval, then to the right person in IT for execution," says Martinelli. "We're starting a SOX audit now, and ChangeGear is making this process much simpler."
Although Rackable's servers are high on performance and their storage systems high on capacity, Martinelli's budget isn't high enough (are they ever?). That didn't matter: he had to get control of the change process. "This was a critical area for me," says Martinelli, "our initial investment was about ten thousand dollars. The other products we checked were much more expensive."
The method used at his old company, home grown text files, spreadsheets, and e-mail exchanges, was prone to errors. Worse, tracking such information during a SOX audit turned out to be nearly impossible. ChangeGear not only tracks everything for compliance, it streamlines the change process and eliminates mistakes.
ChangeGear doesn't make the changes, it just tracks and coordinates them. It runs on Windows, but Marinelli uses it to manage changes to their Windows and Linux servers. Such a system also reinforces IT best practices, a good idea for IT vice presidents joining a new company.
Get your change process organized, and save your Post-It notes for their real job: sticking passwords on monitors.
