What is the business issue?

With the widespread introduction of software packages within the information system, managing application change has reached a whole new level. In addition to managing software components (files, programs, etc.), the challenge is now to integrate a new dimension: changes to configuration data.

In fact, application configuration levels have been steadily growing and becoming more complex. Changes made to these configurations can have a very strong impact on an application’s behavior and the results it will produce. To deal with this risk before it becomes a problem, companies need rigorous organization around the change process or certain critical data. 

What type of data can be considered as “critical” ? All data which, when changed, will have a major impact over other data. It concerns, of course, all “parameter” data of any kind, but also things like prices, for example. If you want to secure the change process of that data, you need to be able to test that the changes are producing the expected results before you actually make the change. This means, you will need to build a dedicated database for testing. Once tested, you will need to manually retype the same changes in your production databases. Tedious and risky, because it's a fully manual process and prone to human error.