What's in this Success Playbook

Automation can meet new expectations for incident and change management, and it delivers both the stability that process needs as well as the speed that new business drivers demand. But automation isn’t simply push-button. This Success Playbook will help you:

• Build a framework that uses automation to identify and resolve critical service issues faster
• Build approaches that use automation to improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of change management

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

• Automation requires a solid set of service definitions and a framework the enterprise has agreed on that helps explain service criticality in terms of its business impact. Automating incident and change management is only helpful when you know where the greatest risks to your business outcomes are.
• Automation requires sufficient, credible data to support response, classification, and remediation.
• Automation should be iterative and focused on continuous process improvement. Few organizations are likely to realize the full potential of out-of-the-box automation and should exploit process performance data to identify where they can continue to fine-tune their approach.

The payoff of getting this right

Effective automation can improve the speed, accuracy, and throughput of your incident and change management processes—helping you to manage cost and improve the quality of IT services.

Steps covered

Step 1: Establish clear dependency mapping

• The benefit of automating depends on the quality and availability of the underlying incident and change management data required.
• Establish maturity in configuration management before you automate.

Step 2: Proactively identify service issues

• Effective automated incident management depends on the quality of the monitoring and event data used to detect and respond to incidents.
• Filter critical from noncritical information with automation so staff can focus on remediation.

Step 3: Automate incident response and resolution

• For effective incident management automation, get clarity on how the organization defines services, on business rules for how service incidents are prioritized, categorized, and assigned, and on processes for escalation, notification, and knowledge management.

Step 4: Automate change management

• Begin your change management automation strategy with clear definitions of business rules for change risk assessment, scheduling, and approvals and oversight.
• Gain a clear understanding of risk, backed by historical data, so you can expedite more standard, low-risk changes with fewer manual steps.

Step 5: Measure impact and tune

• Use Performance Analytics to find ways to improve your automation.
• Use a short list of questions to select the KPIs needed to tune your automation strategy.