Automated Change Risk, Policy Gates, and Release Orchestration: A ServiceNow-Based Framework for IT Service Management | IJCT Volume 13 – Issue 1 | IJCT-V13I1P10
International Journal of Computer Techniques
ISSN 2394-2231
Author
Nayan Patel
Abstract
Change management has become one of the most important aspects of IT service management since unauthorized or ill, considered changes can lead to service downtime, non, compliance, and huge financial loss. We propose a complete framework for automated change risk assessment, policy, driven approval gates, and smart release orchestration using the ServiceNow platform.
By means of a scientific analysis of risk computation methods, machine learning, augmented prediction models, and configuration, as, code governance frameworks, we exhibit the results of 67% decrease in change, related accidents and a 43% improvement in approval cycle times in the enterprise context.
Our approach combines standard risk evaluation methods with CI/CD pipelines, hence turnover enterprises can comply easily with standard change protocols while being quick in deployment scenarios.
The research covers various risk estimation techniques such as property, based evaluation and end, user input models that have been validated across 250+ change requests from six enterprise organizations. The findings reveal that through policy automation using ServiceNow’s Change Advisory Board (CAB), there is a 58% reduction in the manual review time and at the same time the percentage of compliance rises from 72% to 94%.
Moreover, our data show that combining intelligent release orchestration with risk, aware deployment tactics not only decreases rollback incidents by 51% but also improves organizational change success metrics.
By demonstrating how highly closed, multi, team releases in a distributed setting can be managed while at the same time maintaining governance and auditability which are indispensable for current cloud, native and hybrid infrastructure setups this research extends the service management body of knowledge.
Keywords
Change Management, Risk Assessment, Release Orchestration, IT Service Management, ServiceNow, Policy-as-Code, Automated Approval Gates, Cloud Infrastructure
Conclusion
This research presents evidence that automated change risk assessment, policy-driven approval gates, and intelligent release orchestration—implemented within the ServiceNow platform—deliver measurable benefits across multiple dimensions critical to IT service management:
Risk Assessment: Automated risk scoring effectively predicts change outcomes, with critical-risk changes experiencing 58.3% incident correlation and low-risk changes experiencing only 4.6% incident correlation. Assessment-driven methodologies provide superior accuracy (89.3%) compared to property-based approaches (78.2%), though at the cost of longer approval cycles.
Approval Gate Automation: Policy-as-code implementation improved compliance adherence from 72.4% to 94.3%, with particularly dramatic improvements in post-implementation review compliance (+33.6 percentage points). Approval cycle times decreased 43% (from 6.8 days to 3.9 days), demonstrating that governance and velocity are not inherently opposed when intelligent automation is implemented.
Release Orchestration: Multi-team release orchestration reduced rollback incidents by 51.8%, improved approval times by 46.9% for complex changes, and fundamentally shifted the nature of rollback root causes from coordination failures toward genuine technical dependencies.
Policy-as-Code Integration: Organizations integrating change policy enforcement with CI/CD pipelines achieved advanced automation, with 78% of changes proceeding through fully automated gates, though significant platform engineering maturity is required for this approach.
These findings contribute to the IT service management domain by establishing evidence-based practices for bridging the traditional tension between change governance and operational velocity. Rather than accepting this as a necessary tradeoff, intelligent automation enabled by contemporary platforms permits simultaneous achievement of improved governance compliance and reduced approval cycle times.
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How to Cite This Paper
Nayan Patel (2025). Automated Change Risk, Policy Gates, and Release Orchestration: A ServiceNow-Based Framework for IT Service Management. International Journal of Computer Techniques, 12(6). ISSN: 2394-2231.
Automated Change Risk, Policy Gates, and Release Orchestration A ServiceNow-Based Framework for IT Service ManagementDownload
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