I agree with your premise that complexity and changes lead to (as you state) "downtime, slower performing applications, and longer time to resolution when problems occur." Along your line of thought, there are "change management maturity" activities – automating change management, regularly scheduling changes, adopting change management processes like ITIL , etc. that help companies limit the problems that changes cause in production. As complexity grows in IT Operations, this situation will become more challenging. For more information, see research on this topic at www.stacksafe.com/research

Agree with your assertion that change is a leading cause of downtime. My company recently took a closer look at “change management maturity” to better understand how certain organizations gain significant business benefits from their change management process. Our research looks at how more mature activities – automating change management, regularly scheduling changes, adopting ITIL change management processes, etc. – help companies limit the problems that changes cause in production. They can also lower the percentage of IT staffs that must support the change management function. The study is at www.stacksafe.com/research

Would also be interested in a copy of your whitepaper.