Patent ID: 7853675

Claim:
A method, in a computing system, for performing automated change control on one or more data processing system resources, comprising: receiving, in the computing system, a change operation command specifying an operation for changing a configuration of a resource in a data processing system; automatically determining, by the computing system, if one of the change operation or the resource is under strict change control; automatically performing, by the computing system, a request-for-change (RFC) validation check on the change operation command if the change operation or the resource is under strict change control; and automatically performing, by the computing system, a change operation corresponding to the change operation command to thereby change the configuration of the resource if results of the RFC validation check indicate that the change operation should be permitted, wherein the change operation command includes a RFC identifier for a RFC corresponding to the change operation command, and wherein automatically performing a RFC validation check comprises: automatically performing a lookup operation in a service management system based on the RFC identifier to identify the RFC in a database of the service management system; automatically determining if current conditions of resources of the data processing system meet requirements of the RFC, identified in the database by the RFC identifier, for performance of the change operation; and automatically performing error processing on the change operation command if the RFC validation check on the change operation command fails, wherein the error processing comprises one of: permitting the change operation to be performed and issuing at least one message to one or more data processing devices of the data processing system indicating the check failure and indicating that the change operation was permitted; or submitting an incident report, identifying a problem encountered, to a user and automatically performing a re-check of the RFC validation in response to the user responding with an input indicating the problem to be resolved.