Change Management Maturity

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