http://www.stacksafe.com/blog/index.php/2008/01/17/are-you-one-of-the-unfortunate-middle/

Today’s blog entry is all about C H A N G E. Change is dominating the headlines. Change is on everyone’s radar screen. Change is driving our decision-making. And if you’re one of the ‘unfortunate middle’, change is certainly a major issue in your life.

Despite this being a year of wild and wacky Presidential politics, this blog is NOT referring to the “change” that our presidential candidates are embracing. Sorry political junkies, but herein lie no elephants, donkeys, or discussions about the plight of the American middle class (unfortunate or otherwise). However, if you’re an IT professional struggling with production infrastructure change, read on.

As we’ve explained previously, change always concerns IT professionals because of the impact that changes have on downtime and service outages. Our latest report demonstrates that organizational testing maturity can explain much about why change management is a problem for some but not others. The ‘unfortunate middle’ mentioned above represents one of the IT Operations groups introduced by our latest research report, “IT Ops Research Report: Testing Maturity”. This report, produced by Research Edge of Portland, OR, compiles insights from over 400 enterprise IT operational decision-makers regarding the challenge of managing changes to highly-complex, interdependent production infrastructures. This report also identifies criteria to help you determine your Test Maturity Rating.

Adequate testing is an important way of managing user expectations and understanding the processes/activities required in order to recover from an outage or component failure. We might not be able to test every aspect of the solution, but as long as we can show due diligence, understand how the system works, document the support responsibilities, the actions required when events happen to recover service, we can minimize the time taken to resolve problems in production. Do check out this interesting post about it!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 10:45 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.