We’ ve been getting“ DevOps vs ITIL” wrong By Jon Hall
We’ ve been getting“ DevOps vs ITIL” wrong By Jon Hall
At DevOps conferences, I’ ve observed some very negative sentiment about ITIL and ITSM. In particular, the Change Advisory Board is frequently cited as a symbol of ITSM’ s anachronistic bureaucracy. They have a point. Enterprise IT support organisations are seen as slow, siloed structures built around an outdated three-tier application model.
None of this should be a surprise. The Agile Manifesto, effectively the DevOps movement’ s Declaration of Independence, explicitly values individualism over process, and reactiveness over structure. The manifesto is the specific antithesis of the traits seen in that negative perception of ITSM.
ITSM commentary on DevOps, meanwhile, is inconsistent, ranging from outright confusion to sheer overconfidence. The complaints of the DevOps community are frequently acknowledged, but they are often waved away on the basis that ITSM is“ just a framework”, and hence it should be perfectly possible to fit Devops within that framework. If that doesn’ t work, the framework must have been implemented badly. Again, this is a reasonable point.
4 itSMF Bulletin— February 2017
But there’ s a recurring problem with the debate: it tends to focus primarily on processes: two ITIL processes in particular. ITSM commentators frequently argue that Change Management already supports the notion of automated, pre-approved changes. DevOps“ is just mature ITIL Release Management”, stated an opinion piece in the Australian edition of Computerworld( a remarkable assertion, but we’ ll come to that later). Some of the more robust sceptics in the DevOps community focus on ITSM’ s process silos and their incompatibility with the new agility in software development.
Certainly, the ITSM community has to realise that there is a revolution happening in software production. Here are some statements which are easy to back up with real-world evidence:
� DevOps methodology fundamentally improves some of the inefficiencies of old, waterfall-driven processes.
� Slow, unnecessarily cumbersome processes are expensive in themselves, and they create opportunity costs by stifling innovation.
� Agile, autonomous teams of developers are unleashing creativity and innovation at a new pace.