How ITIL/ITSM can be better with DevOps?

Author: Abhishek Lahiri

There is a general thought process now among the IT leadership team in big companies that the traditional ITIL/ITSM processes are becoming obsolete. However I think this view is partially wrong. While it is true that the traditional IT processes (and I mean just the “process” itself) in most organization has to change, I think that the ITIL and ITSM principles are as important as before and will continue to do so.

There is a many reasons why ITSM/ITIL exists. Some of the practical reasons are:

• Provide assurance and guarantee to business through
  SLA measurement
  Change Control
• Maintain Records for compliance and auditing
  CMDB
  Historical Change records

These reasons are still valid. Most of the businesses once they grow out of a startup scale , have to work within a regulatory environment and IT has to still continue to provide a “service” to the core business. And still there is and will be a requirement to do all of the above. There will be a requirement to measure everything continuously and to establish SLAs and KPIs to measure for various reasons. This can range from justifying IT’s budget to identifying and narrow down list of technical debts to address for continuos improvement.

Similarly there is still requirement to track and monitor changes in the environment and to refer to completed changes for either auditing requirements or simply for troubleshooting. We still need to know and maintain our asset lists and the CIs. My point is that these requirements have not change and I don’t see them changing in the near future.

Therefore I don’t think the principles of ITSM will be obsolete, but I agree the tools to implement ITSM has to evolve to support more agile workflows , which have a significantly higher velocity than before. But on the other hand this is a great opportunity to make the tools more robust.

Full article: datauniv.com/blogs/2015/05/22/how-itilitsm-can-be-better-with-devops