In an interview with Government Computer News (GCN), Malcolm Fry was asked to compare ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) with Enterprise architecture:
To my mind, ITIL is, to some degree, enterprise architecture. I don’t see a reason [why], when you have six different service desks in an organization, you can’t have one process that they all follow and one database that they all put their incidents into.
My experience with ITIL is quite limited, but based on my understanding, it seems much more concerned with change management and ongoing processes as opposed to EA's focus on business driven, strategic, target state realization. EA is, with all due respect, is a bit more involved than 'recording incidents' in a common repository.
That said, I'm sure that both practices have their place, and many organizations could benefit from either or both.
The new version 3 of ITIL has much more on strategic thinking, enterprise architecture and so on. Actually, this was also present in version 2 but often overlooked.
Version 3 brings strategy right to the forefront of the focus of the service management discipline.
Posted by: ITIL | January 13, 2008 at 09:51 AM