Months into minutes: Rolling out changes faster with service management automation

Service Management Automation is widely regarded as the foundation for improving both productivity as well as quality of Service Delivery. For large Service Providers such as IBM Global Technology Services (GTS), Hybrid IT deployments present a variety of challenges in large deployments on a global scale. We describe an approach and our experiences to drastically improve the cycle times of change management, based on an extensive Service Request Catalog and a CMDB. We point out the key design points of our architecture and describe the tradeoffs we had to make, which we subsequently distill into a set of best practices.