December 11, 2008, 11:18 AM — ‘Twas the night before upgrades, when all through the shop
Not a coffee was pouring, not even a drop.
The trouble tickets were entered in the system with care
With knowledge that good service was desired everywhere.
The change notices were nestled all snug in their place
And visions of smooth implementations swirled in cyberspace.
The CIO in his Dockers, and I in my sweats
Had just settled down to work with no regrets.
When out on the network there arose such a clatter
I looked at my Blackberry to see what was the matter.
Away to our website, I flew like a flash
I looked at our home page and contemplated our SaaS.
The website was down, and couldn’t process transactions
Customers left the site with their dissatisfactions.
When, what to my wondering mind should appear
But the thought that management software could take over from here!
With great knowledge and insight, so lively and fast
I knew in a moment this nightmare would pass.
Swifter than eagles, the solutions they came
I started clicking my mouse, and called them by name!
"First incident, now problem. Now change management and now service aware!
On patches. On discovery! Use CMDB, to be fair!
To the heart of the change! That’s what I did call!
Now dash away troubles. Dash away all!"
The broken processes were fixed and orders quit going awry
When met with an obstacle, the solutions reached for the sky.
So up through the Ethernet the erroneous changes did fly
As ITIL-based processes and solutions came to our cry.
And then, in a twinkling, I saw on the site
Customers were purchasing with a frenzied delight.
I wiped sweat off my head, and was turning around
When orders came flying in with a bound.
The software had done its job so well
No changes were noticed that anyone could tell.
Customer orders grew by the hour
We controlled our changes and regained our power.
If we’d only used predictive software earlier, we could have been merry!
The outage wouldn’t have made everything so hairy!
We could have kept the site from ever going down
It would have been much better all around.
The servers, networks, databases, and applications would be just fine
They’d be able to accommodate changes…and all in real-time.
Our internal business users would exclaim, “Hooray,â€
Because they’d know we’d met each SLA.
My internal customer greeted me with a grin
And I smiled, because I knew we would continue to win.
A wink of his eye and a turn of his head
Soon let me know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work
And looked at our metrics, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger, he pointed to sales
And said they would grow when nothing fails.
He walked out the door, and I knew this would be quite a year
We’d control change, and have nothing to fear.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight
"The next upgrade will be better, so have a good night!"
