In today’s competitive business environment, organizations are striving to achieve excellence in their service offerings. And this has given rise to robust service management methodologies, first in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and now in DevOps. Many of you know what ITIL is and how it adds value to the organization. But for beginners, ITIL is a widely recognized de facto standard for IT management and services in an organization. Established in the early 80s by the HMG and OGC, it was extensively used by both public and private sectors in the UK and later in major European countries and now all over the world.
Though the original ITIL framework was published in the 80s, the framework and its structure have evolved a lot, and it is more flexible to cater to the demands of changing business landscapes across the globe. Today, ITIL v3 and its framework have to support the organizational business initiatives and strategy.
At the same time, DevOps has gained a lot of momentum recently and is now ingrained in the culture of many forward-thinking organizations. And this raises an important question, can we still keep the robust ITIL framework, and yet an organization can embrace DevOps?
So, let us quickly outline the key components of both ITIL v3 and DevOps to get a better understanding of both the frameworks in an IT environment.
Service Strategy:
This Service Lifecycle module provides you with guidance that helps you to design, develop, and implement Service Strategy (SS) that aligns with the organizational strategy.
Service Design:
Service Design (SD) focuses on the design of IT services. It also covers the IT architectures, processes, policies, and various documentation that will enable one to design services that address the needs of the organization.
Service Transition:
Service Transition (ST) clearly focuses on major process and practice elements and management techniques that are required to build, test and implement products and services.
Service Operation:
This ITIL Service Operation (SO) module focuses on the principles, processes, operational activities, and functions of an organization that helps individuals properly manage how their products and services perform.
Continual Service Improvement:
This is one such process that focuses on how enterprises and the workforce together can strategically review the products and services that have been produced by following the strategy, design, transition, and operation stages of the IT Service Lifecycle and in return offers guidance on how this process should be organized and executed.
Now let’s lay out an engagement model for the transition of the culture to DevOps.
DevOps Strategy:
Helps you to establish metrics that outline the business objective and values
DevOps Design:
Establishes robust capacity, availability, and security best practices in an organization
DevOps Transition:
Helps in establishing organizational structure and defines Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
DevOps Operation:
DevOps Operation is all about shifting to Agile; creating programmatic CMDB and driving change
DevOps Improvement:
Establishes automation of key entities such as incident, problem, and even. It also helps to create an effective feedback loop in an organization.
With this, you can make out that there is not a big gap between ITIL and DevOps. There are a few processes that overlap with each other, but the main changes are cultural and not technical. Hence, one can use DevOps and ITIL together with the use of technology to initiate the change in the organizational culture.
One of the most common myths doing rounds in enterprises across the globe is that DevOps will replace ITIL down the line, but the whole thing is far from the truth. Even high-performing DevOps organizations need robust process design, execution, and a relentless desire to improve those processes.
By combining both the worlds in ITIL and DevOps, industry experts believe that technology should be part of the team. For instance, development, testing, operations, and information security should all come together in helping the organization to establish itself in the ever-so-competitive marketplace. For that to happen there should be a change in the organization’s culture, especially in the IT operations. It should change from personnel taking orders to perform the work that has been assigned to the one where they work together to achieve organizational goals.
