Industry: Non-profit organization
Employees: 500+

The Company

The First Church of Christ, Scientist (TFCCS) is a non-profit organization which includes 1850 branch churches and societies in 80 countries. TFCCS is also the publisher of The Christian Science Monitor, an award-winning international news organization renowned for its in-depth and unbiased coverage of events and issues worldwide. Now almost 100 years old, the Monitor has won hundreds of journalism honors including seven Pulitzer Prizes.

The Challenge

Meeting the business demands of maintaining IT service uptime with over 300 servers running a variety of operating systems is challenging. As new systems were being added and the TFCCS infrastructure expanded, the challenge of manually managing changes to the system became a problem.

TFCCS had two clear mandates as they began to investigate change management solutions. The first mandate was Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI Data Security compliance. The second mandate was to substantially decrease unscheduled downtime and increase efficiency in maintaining and upgrading infrastructure components. “With an IT staff of only 35, we had to find ways to do more with less and still be able to audit every change, for every component in our technical environment.” said Terry Barbounis, CTO at TFCCS.

The SunView Software Solution

Upon learning about the benefits of the ITIL best practices, Terry decided to narrow his search for a change management product to those based on the ITIL framework. Another requirement in his selection process was finding a product that would allow TFCCS to get their users up and running quickly.

After evaluating several change management solutions, TFCCS selected ChangeGear™ Change Management from SunView Software. “We chose ChangeGear because it had all of the features and functionality we were looking for,” commented Terry. “Our deployment was smooth and easy and the SunView support team bent over backwards to help resolve the few issues we did have.”

The Results

As a result of deploying ChangeGear, TFCCS reports significant improvements in their IT service uptime. Tracking and managing every change to their environment, coupled with the ability to easily create detailed reports about this activity is a huge benefit to the organization. “ChangeGear’s robust reporting helps us quickly spot trends that may be indicative of serious problems,” said Terry. “For example, if we see that we have 30% more changes of a particular type than we normally have during the same time period, a red flag goes up. We can then identify the issue and proactively correct it before it turns into system downtime.”

Terry also stated, “Worrying about change doesn’t keep me up at night anymore because ChangeGear has given me the visibility into our change process to be proactive with our IT issues instead of reactive. We have reduced the unscheduled changes to our production environment by at least 25 to 30 percent. In fact, a recent independent audit of our environment took less than a day to complete; prior to implementing ChangeGear, these yearly audits took on average several days.”