SOA Advisor
Unifying IT with ITIL
The new release of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) will help usher a modernization movement that could deeply impact developers.
- By Dana Gardner
- 03/15/2007
This April, the release of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) version 3 will help usher a modernization movement that could deeply impact developers. The updated set of best practices for information technology departments will have its adherents and detractors, but many enterprises -- especially large, global organizations -- are taking ITIL seriously.
And no wonder. Complex enterprises are seeking commonality on how all major departments and functions are governed, in order to streamline and coordinate the act of enterprise-wide governance itself. The advance could change the nature of IT operations, which often behave more like a skunk works unit than the foundation of modern mass productivity.
Setting Global Standards
Formulated in the 1980s
by the British government (which still owns the copyright), ITIL consists of a "library" of 30 books that in the last decades was distilled down to eight tomes. These describe best practices and offer guidance in organizing the operational processes that deliver IT services to an enterprise or government.
Now, ITIL is being further condensed down to five organized books, based on the five major aspects of the modern IT services lifecycle. These are:
- How to handle strategies around IT services
- How to design an IT service
- How to transition that service into operations
- How to operate the service
- How to continually improve service delivery
The arrival of ITIL version 3 this spring provides an evolutionary shift, not an outright replacement of the previous versions. The new emphasis is on treating IT as a utility to make core IT processes more dependable. From that base, developers and architects can then exploit the utility to differentiate and innovate around more business-focused services, processes and industry-specific improvements.
Regulatory compliance is a second driver for ITIL 3. Compliance further demands that all processes come under definition, control and verification. Compliance also means organizations need to demonstrate, via defined and accepted standards, the level of quality they provide to their customers, who themselves
are facing regulations to demonstrate quality assurance.
This cycle drives the need for wider certification, such as for ISO/IEC 2000 for IT Service Management tenets. With such certification, an IT organization can go to
the outside world and offer services in the open market, or use verified competencies as a protection mechanism for the internal IT organization to prevent themselves from becoming outsourced. ITIL helps IT organizations measure and demonstrate the value and quality of the services they provide.
Better Outsourcing Options for CIOs
As ITIL version 3 focuses enterprises on managing IT departments as a whole -- taking an integral view of how to manage applications, infrastructure components, hardware, etc. -- outsourcing becomes a natural tool to employ. Choices about what aspects of IT to keep, cut or outsource offer CIOs more options. Commonly managed services based on ITIL can be integrated, no matter their origins, location or ownership.
It's no surprise, then, that large outsourcing firms in India are quickly moving to ITIL certification. Three years ago, there were some 600 qualified, top-level manager ITIL people in the world. Recently, India alone produced 600. Companies like BMC Software Inc. and Hewlett-Packard are training thousands of companies globally on ITIL practices and principles.
The result: A lot of IT services will be commoditized over the next five years. Developers and architects can and should remain on the cutting edge of providing differentiating value to enterprises as contractors, part of outsourced services providers or in-house development corps. Companies will still vary widely on how they manage their environments, integrate things
like Service-Oriented Architecture or deploy SOA in their environments -- and developers will make or break those advancements.
ITIL is likely to accelerate the move toward IT as a service provider activity. That in turn accelerates the need to decide what to keep in-house, where to compete with others and where your organization's unique capabilities complement others'. The result is looking at IT as a supply chain, with complementors and competitors. IT will become a value network that enterprises and IT leaders will have to manage. Who manages the network best is where the new IT differentiation will be in the future.
What tools developers use or which runtimes administrators deploy may matter much less than how well they manage the total processes behind IT. So whether developers use Eclipse or Visual Studio, whether they are all in-house or leverage a mixture of resources, whether they deploy a unified infrastructure or roll their own -- the major change for application development organizations as subsets of larger IT supply chains will -- over the next five years -- have more to do with things like ITIL than an object model.
About the Author
Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research and consulting firm. Gardner tracks and analyzes Web services, application-development tools and application optimization techniques. He is also the producer of the podcast series, BriefingsDirect.