Tools

[Harden-p40]

As an employee of the Church, we are seeking experiences from the tech community on change management. As all technologist have had to deal with change management, we would like to receive your feedback on what tools have you used that work extremely well with Release Management, Configuration Management - moving code from one environment to another for different technology, e.g., Peoplesoft, Oracle, Java, etc...

[oobx-p40]

I'm in charge of a Computer Associates Clarity install at a top-tier University. It's web-based IT governance software. We're just getting it off the ground. I'll try to remember to post more info as I become more familiar with it.

Thus far, I'm skeptical about the ROI. We have a statewide Oracle license (also runs on MSSQL). We chose to go with Tomcat rather than Webspere or Weblogic. And, I don't know if we'll stress it, but, we've spent $50k on Sun hardware (edu pricing). x86, AIX, HP-UX hardware would also work.

But, it will import MS project files, integrate with Remedy (and more), allow one to manage products, portfolios, financial, etc. Management just really wants the dashboard.

See http://niku.com for the official site. CA bought niku.

[portseven-p40]

I have also used a package called 'System Architect' by Telelogic (though IBM have just bought them), it allows you to map your architecture and the interdependencies between systems on that architecture.

So in the context of change management you could use this tool to assess change impact. So you could ask it 'If I made this change here, what is the impact on my architecture'

It's a very cool tool and one I would highly recommend

[Eric Werny-p40]

What was the cost of implementation of the software?

I have also used a package called 'System Architect' by Telelogic (though IBM have just bought them), it allows you to map your architecture and the interdependencies between systems on that architecture.

So in the context of change management you could use this tool to assess change impact. So you could ask it 'If I made this change here, what is the impact on my architecture'

It's a very cool tool and one I would highly recommend

[Jodyman-p40]

On our HP-UX side (SQL Scripts, Unix Shell Scripts, PL/SQL Scripts) we are using a package called RCS but are to be moving to Merant (who was bought by Serena http://www.serena.com/).

On our Delphi 5 & 7, we are using Borland TeamSource which isn't so good.

I think our current RCS is a home rolled solution so our company would be SOX compliant (publicly traded company - $2.5B Company).

We have a four tier system for migration... Development, Staging, Training and Production.

Do non-profits have government imposed compliancies with software development or are you just trying to implement a world-class / best practices scenario for software development?

Jody

[portseven-p40]

What was the cost of implementation of the software?

Well installation was a couple of days, it needs a backend SQL database, so MS SQL is unfortunatally the option there. Add to that a couple of days of training from Teleogic (very helpfull) and probably a couple of weeks for us to get our heads round it.

So cost of implementation depends on your resource, we are in an outsourced aranagment at my current client and so every hour is accounted for. In total I would say I spent about £10 - 15K on the installation. Though I see that being paid back, in reducing the time for any projects going forward not having to find a architecture documentation and impact analysis on any changes they may want to do.

Like with a lot of things you need to decide what you want to use it for and how you want to use it, before you even put a CD in! It's a very flexible product and can do some very cool things round impact analysis as well as modeling against whatever Architecture framework you are using (TOGAF, IAF etc)

The package itself is a few grand a user (£3500 iirc)

[irwinjt-p40]

Hello,

I am an Application Systems Engineer for the Church. Currently there is a project in the Plan phase that will be implementing BMC Remedy Change Management globally for the Information and Communications Department of the Church. This will interact with the Remedy Incident and Problem Management applications and also the Configuration Management Database.

[mhelmant]

After 16 years of using InfoMan at Visa, we migrated to Remedy with a NewScale work flow front end. It is working fine and will become the basis for our CMDB. BMC Remedy provides the robust architecture for building an enterprise application that will incorporate a variety of tools that are being designed for connectivity under ITIL V3.

[ryttinch-p40]

Where I work we use the Mercury (purchased by HP a couple years ago) suite of solutions. For Change management we use IT Governance (ITG) which is highly configurable to meet the needs of the organization. This product also melds into the monitoring we use here (Sitescope for system monitoring and Topaz to mirror user experience). ITG is also used for the application portfolio so we know what applications are used by each of the P&L sub-businesses attached to the parent business.

For configuration management/application mapping we are using nLayers to attempt automated maps of applications with all of the different technologies they touch. Some of them would seem to have more tentacles than all the squid in the ocean combined.