Change control has always been a thorn in the side of IT, with procedure taking precedence over efficiency for the sake of risk reduction. To make things worse, limited visibility and poorly implemented enforcement mechanisms leave organizations with no choice but to put governance in the hands of practitioners, who often consider it nothing more than unnecessary bureaucracy getting in the way of their work.

“Having an accurate model of what the IT infrastructure actually is, what’s behind the actual business services, and having the relationships between those business services…is essential before you can actually aspire to manage those things,” explained Mike Nappi, Senior Director of Automation at ServiceNow, in a recent chat with SiliconANGLE founder and CEO John Furrier (see the entire interview below).

Without this degree of transparency, managers have practically no way of ensuring that updates are thoroughly tested and logged before they are rolled out into production. Undocumented changes not only open the door to service disruptions, but also complicate troubleshooting and slow down problem resolution.

ServiceNow is hoping to shake up this paradigm with Configuration Automation, a new administration app designed to streamline the provisioning of physical, virtual and cloud-based IT environments.

The software bundles the ServiceNow Change Management and Configuration Management tools with the company’s Cloud Provisioning application and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) in a unified system for data center orchestration. It also integrates with Puppet, a popular open-source automation framework.

“Puppet’s got this very powerful architecture for managing the configuration of the data center. And essentially what it has is a model-based store that they call Puppet Master [which] contains the configuration records for all the different server roles in the enterprise,” Nappi tells Furrier. “ServiceNow connects to that; [it] essentially replaces the Puppet Master in our integration as the external node classifier. What it means is, we become the authority for configuration change in a Puppet environment.”

Configuration Automation automatically initiates governance processes whenever an admin updates the CMDB or submits a change request through the ServiceNow Service Catalog. By eliminating the need to use different tools to manage infrastructure, the platform simplifies compliance, helps IT organizations improve quality of service, and gets them that much closer to the single version of the truth.