Automated Change Risk, Policy Gates, and Release Orchestration: A Service Now-Based Framework for IT Service Management

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