Enterprise Abstraction

ITIL and SOA

More on the relationship between ITIL and EA from IBM.

 

In this paper, delve a little deeper into the ITIL processes and their sub-modules. Then take a look at how you can leverage ITIL-based canonical domain models and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to provide a messaging infrastructure that can integrate and automate applications catering to IT service management concerns, while still helping your enterprise realize its vision of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

-- Link via Real World SOA: Is SOA Boring by Dave Linthicum.

ZDNet's Joe McKendrick posts regarding (North) American ITIL through a survey by OVUM:

...the survey found a high correlation between a business' level of satisfaction with SOA and their commitment to managing IT as a set of services. Leading-edge SOA adopters, in fact, are more likely to be also adopting IT infrastructure library (ITIL), service desks, asset and configuration management tools, IT portfolio management tools and business service management performance monitoring dashboards.

He's followed up his first post on the topic with some endorsements of the linkage between SOA with ITIL as an appropriate service management compliment.

Silicon.com follows up with an article that succinctly describes some of the newly exposed IT management issues exposed via SOA adoption:

The Ovum survey found a high correlation between a business' level of satisfaction with SOA and their commitment to managing IT as a set of services. Examples of best practice amongst leading edge adopters include IT infrastructure library (Itil), service desks, asset and configuration management tools, IT portfolio management tools and business service management performance monitoring dashboards.

See my previous post on this topic.

ITIL

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.