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Computerworld - In an August 2004 Computerworld.com article titled "An Introduction to Visible Ops," Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford described their methodology for implementing the best practices found in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This methodology, known as Visible Ops, was the result of over three years of interviews with hundreds of IT organizations. Eight high-performing IT organizations were identified as having the highest service levels, best security and best efficiencies. Visible Ops codifies how these eight organizations transformed from good to great, providing a "best of breed" approach for those interested in replicating their key processes.
Today, as many IT organizations look for ways to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory requirements, Visible Ops is attracting interest as the clearest path to a more comprehensive IT change management program.
While engaged in consulting projects using the Visible Ops methodology to build practical, repeatable change management programs for organizations of all sizes, we discovered the following:

1. The configuration management database (CMDB) -- the concept at the heart of Visible Ops -- is often the primary obstacle to starting down the path toward a culture of solid change management.


2. Most organizations lack a process-driven approach for evaluation and mitigation of change-related risks -- a key capability for improving performance and service levels.

Fortunately, we've found several shortcuts for developing a CMDB and for identifying crucial change-related risks. These shortcuts are processes that can be used as a "stake in the ground" to begin a successful change management implementation without creating yet another IT bureaucracy.
The first shortcut deals with Visible Ops Phase 2: "Catch and Release, Find Fragile Artifacts." This phase often causes immediate concern because it implies that some equipment, services, or processes are fragile. Yet the very willingness to recognize that change can expose fragility in equipment and processes is a core tenet of Visible Ops. It's the primary motivation for inventorying and categorizing assets in terms of risk.
For every asset that supports business critical services, Visible Ops asks several questions to determine the asset's importance and stability. This can be a daunting task, because most corporations have hundreds of servers, routers, processes, etc. Recording and regularly updating the answer to each of these questions would be a huge task.
Shortcut No. 1: It isn't necessary to identify every piece of information relative to every asset to significantly improve an organization's change management processes. Simplify the task by inventorying asset "types" or "classes."
For example, although an organization may have hundreds of individual routers, we recommend inventorying