Solution
Dependency & impact visibility
Know what is affected before anyone has to ask.
The problem
“What else is affected?” should take a moment to answer. In most organizations it takes a meeting.
Dependencies live in people’s memories, in diagrams that were accurate on the day they were drawn, and in configuration databases too heavy to keep current. When a system is degraded or a change is proposed, the impact is discovered rather than known.
If ERP is degraded, every system downstream of it is highlighted.
How Renevell addresses it
- One map, maintained with the work
- Each system, server, interface and facility is recorded once with its owner, contacts, recovery tier and dependencies in EA Sphere. Because changes to the records follow the work that changes the systems, the map stays current.
- Impact in both directions
- Place any system at the centre of the map to see what it depends on and what depends on it, with the direction of data flow on every link and the work currently touching each system.
- Tier gaps made visible
- When a critical system depends on something held to a less demanding recovery tier, the record says so, before an outage proves it.
- Reports for the review
- Systems, dependencies and data gaps can be reported on and exported for architecture reviews and audits.
Who it is for
IT operations, enterprise architecture and service owners who are asked to certify impact before a change and to explain it after a failure.
Organizations that have attempted a full CMDB and found that the effort of keeping it current exceeded the value it returned.