Such analogies are never perfect. Consider a pineapple juice factory. Pineapples go in at one end and cans of juice in shipping boxes come out the other end to be sent all over the world. In between you’ll find ranks of highly specialized machines designed to carry out each intermediate task – trim away husks, crush the fruit, and so forth through the entire canning process. Multiple machines work together, automated or under human direction or some combination. The machines are complicated, probably not all made by the same company, and each step is precisely defined in advance.

This kind of factory is a model of efficiency but, if one part breaks down, the whole line has to stop or slow because, as a process, there’s no room for flexibility or process adjustment to compensate for problems. Changing any part of the line is a major engineering exercise and brings the entire process to a halt during the change.

As a model, that doesn’t fit IT very well because, in IT, change is constant. So the analogy fails in that respect. Constant change means you have an absolute requirement to be nimble and to stay strategic in managing change or adjusting IT processes in your organization. You might be operating a pineapple juice factory, but the CIO isn’t evaluated on the pineapple juice itself.

Where “like a factory” gains its power for IT is at a higher level, where you look at ROI as the resulting product. Your technical objectives are optimum efficiency in a reliable and highly integrated set of processes, where each software solution fits those before and after with precision, where nothing is lost and the output never depends on chance or other random factors. You’ll agree – that’s a fine ideal for an IT “factory.”

What’s more, it’s not only an ideal, it’s a mandate today – a necessary set of objectives in today’s complex SAP environments. The trick is to bring that state of efficiency and smooth operation to systems that are increasingly modular, serving data processes that become ever more complex as organizations grow and change.

SAP’s modular approach provides all the flexibility you need to assemble IT components and support your company’s processes, even though no two organizations are ever the same. But that’s just the starting point. Since change is constant, you’ll need to never compromise three core IT values:

• Automation
• Flexibility
• Improved Visibility, Control (policy enforcement), and Auditability

Rigid processes can work for a physical factory but in an IT infrastructure they’ll drag like an anchor. And there’s no need for them.

In the next few posts, I’ll discuss the role of each of these core qualities in maintaining your IT infrastructure where change control is concerned, while gaining the efficiency and reliability of running your SAP-based IT organization “like a factory.” Be sure not to miss them, because the values I’ll discuss can make the difference between success and failure when you set out to run an efficient, reliable, high-ROI information infrastructure.

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Rick Porter, Vice President of Business Development
Revelation Software Concepts
www.xrsc.com

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Rick Porter, Vice President of Business Development
Revelation Software Concepts
www.xrsc.com

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Rick Porter, Vice President of Business Development
Revelation Software Concepts
www.xrsc.com

These findings were recently confirmed by Protiviti, a global IT and audit consulting firm headquartered in California. Protiviti’s 2012 Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Survey takes a systematic look at the many SOX compliance issues affecting companies and concludes that automation may be the “final frontier” for long-term savings in the cost of SOX-compliant processes and controls.

Of course, compliance and audits go hand in hand. Nobody enjoys audits but any large enterprise knows they’re necessary. Audits give you a handle on an IT system’s reliability of information and quality of internal controls, so audits are essential for good management.

To the IT team, however, audits can be burdens. They can take time and staff away from normal work, though it can be hard to show “real” returns on audit-support expenditures. For IT, an ideal audit is quickly completed, generates no exceptions and diverts few resources.

A clean audit does prove that your controls work and your documentation is complete, and both are important to any stakeholder. Reducing audit support costs is therefore the challenge.

The more automated your change process is, the more complete your documentation and the less time it will take to satisfy auditors. Automation makes you more audit-ready, and that lowers operating costs. Audit-ready documentation returns value that is very easy to show, using a baseline of your pre-automation audit support costs.

Protiviti’s survey makes a key point that, while SOX compliance can be burdensome to new filers, organizations in the long term usually conclude that the benefits outweigh the costs. Compliance sharpens internal controls, which increases process efficiencies.

Automation is a good way to lower costs and improve a company’s competitive position. The key is to automate your controls while keeping the process flexible. Aim not only for IT change process automation but for better risk management as well.

To evaluate candidate compliance tools, use automation and flexibility as key criteria. You’ll need a good basic understanding of how audits work and what data an audit team will need your team to have on hand. Look for a tool that will help your team deliver additional data quickly if the auditors need it, rather than go on expensive data hunts.

With the right tool, you’ll see better system governance and policy enforcement will benefit your IT team, not be a burden. The business side will see faster responses, making them more nimble when market conditions change. They’ll have more confidence in your team’s IT support.

These are all outcomes the business side will appreciate.

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Rick Porter, Vice President of Business Development
Revelation Software Concepts
www.xrsc.com

Automation

Consider for a moment the many manual tasks involved in managing changes to an IT application. Each manual task comes with a cost – both in human effort and in risk to IT system stability. Here are just some of the manual, human effort cost and risk points:

• Managing change transports from source system to target system
• Checking for change transport sequencing errors
• Checking for object version conflicts
• Obtaining paper approvals
• Policing change control process
• Linking service desk records to technical change records
• Fulfilling auditor requests for information
• Managing change releases and projects
• Communicating status of change to the business customers
• Production down time due to human error

In addition, the more complex the IT system architecture and the higher the volume of change, the higher the total costs and overall risks of change. In the end, the change record does not match the system reality and the auditor has a field day.

Cost reductions

Eliminating human change management tasks through change management automation can see an immediate reduction in application management costs. Examples include:

• Elimination of manual transport handling
• Elimination of change sequencing checking
• Elimination of manual conflict checking (and reparation after the event)
• Elimination of approval collections and lost paper work
• Significant reduction (from days to hours) involved in change management audit
• Elimination of change management policy policing
• Elimination of change record duplication
• Elimination of manual reporting to business stakeholders

It is not uncommon for an IT team to require a person responsible for maintaining extensive transport record spread sheets, another person or persons responsible for manually migrating transports from source to target systems and another person responsible for policing the change management process – each of which can be immediately redeployed upon implementation of change management automation.

ROI

Since change management automation tools are not free, the ROI comes from a range of significant assurances and improvements available such as:

• Process compliance assurance
• Change management task completion assurance – resulting in quality assurance
• Quality improvements and system stability assurance
• Developer efficiency improvements
• Concurrent project management improvement
• Shorter project delivery timeframes

In the end, change management automation not only reduces the cost of managing change, but increases change quality, better assures production stability and increases the amount concurrent change that can be managed.

Final word

By implementing an SAP change management automation toolset strategy, IT organizations can benefit not just in hard time and cost reductions but also through a range of less tangible benefits including efficiency, quality and compliance improvements.

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Rick Porter, Vice President of Business Development
Revelation Software Concepts
www.xrsc.com