I was recently asked about Standard Operations and Maintenance activities relative to the Change Enablement practice and SLAs. Here are a few thoughts. Standard Operations and Maintenance is really something that is defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in consultation and negotiation with the customer. It is not a determination made solely by IT or Operations. The customer or receiver of service helps to establish whether an “outage” has occurred. Because we want to adhere to the terms and conditions set forth in the SLA, strong controls should be in place. It is not a question of whether the Change Enablement practice will be used, but rather the degree of Change Enablement that will be applied. A solid approach is to establish a clear definition of what constitutes a change in the organization. ITIL defines a change as “the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.” This is a broad definition and covers just ...