Have you ever had your work interrupted by a Network or Server Outage? Have you come to find out later that it was a scheduled outage, only adding to the frustration of Hours interrupted and Dollars lost in productivity? All Networks require maintenance and upkeep. With Planning, Interaction and Accountability, any City's Change Control process can be seamless to the daily users.

The first step in more efficiently managing any function is developing and deploying a plan. Guidelines of how, why and when Changes are to be made on a network is the first major step in developing automation for change. With a proper plan in place all users who would like to make a change know the process, and all users affected by the change can be notified of what changes are pending.

Business Process Automation can lead to the next level of success in network changes. Everything from automatic email notifications for impacted users to dynamically selecting the approvers based on Issue Type, Blackout approval, Level of Impact, Geographic Area, or any other criteria deemed necessary.

After processes are defined and implemented, accountability can add a great deal of dynamics to the change process. The ability, at a glance, to know the approval status of a pending change can more easily facilitate the approval. Over time accountability can lead to far greater process improvements.

Novell Inc has implemented a World Wide Change Control System based on the Technologies and Process Modeling of MetrixBPM. Since the implementation of the new process Changes have not only gone much more smoothly with lower turn around times, but with automatic notifications of end users, the IS&T Department has served its customers much more efficiently with less effort. The bottom line, more productivity, less surprises, better customer service and tangible results.