Towards solid IT Change Management: Automated detection of conflicting IT change plans

Change Management, a core process of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is concerned with the management of changes to networks and services to satisfy business goals and to minimize costly disruptions on the business. As part of Change Management, IT changes are planned for and scheduled for execution. With several uncoordinated IT operators and different (semi-)automated tools participating in the generation of IT change plans conflicts among them are likely to occur. Furthermore, state of the art IT change planners fail to prevent conflicts among plans. Conflicting IT changes, which render each other infeasible, ultimately lead to failed IT change plans and threaten the continuity of a business due to unsatisfied business goals. To tackle this problem we propose an algorithm for the automated detection of conflicting IT change plans. The algorithm is applied to several IT changes from the network and service management domain. Using simulation we identify and discuss characteristics of IT changes and plans that make deciding conflict freeness among plans more difficult. We find that our algorithm is able to decide the absence of conflicts among synthetically generated IT change plans (1-200 CRs per plan, up to 2000 CRs in total) in the context of large CMDBs (50,000 CIs) and modestly skewed IT changes. The advantage of our solution lies within the tight integration of object-oriented models, frequently used to describe CMDBs in research and commercial systems. Furthermore, existing IT change planners and schedulers remain unchanged while our solution prevents inter-plan conflicts.