With the onset of practices such as DevOps,
Continuous Delivery, Rugged Code, and Value stream mapping, is ITIL / ITSM Best
Practice still relevant?
The short and emphatic answer is YES!
Let’s look at how ITSM Best Practices
are relevant and enable some of the initiatives that are in the foreground of Service
Management for many contemporary IT organizations today.
DevOps –
DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that focuses on communication
and collaboration to ensure a balance between responsiveness to dynamic
business requirements and stability. Therefore,
things like Lean and Value Stream Mapping, practices like Continuous Delivery
and Continuous Deployment, all become a subset or a building block to a
successful DevOps initiative. DevOps is
frequently an organic approach toward automating workflow and getting products
to market more efficiently. Ok, if we can accept that then the next question is
… What are you going to automate?
ITSM Best Practice – Provides the cornerstone for the activities referred
to as “ITSM Processes”. The need for these
activities does not go away. They need
to be performed to get any hope of meeting compliance, mitigating risk and to
ensure value for any product or service that is being designed, deployed and
more importantly sustained over the life of that product or service. If DevOps integrates teams throughout the
value stream including Service Operation teams the better question is how could
you even think about omitting best practice?
What is going to change is how we go about creating and fulfilling the
processes throughout the service lifecycle.
Agile software development is money out the window if we do not have
Agile processes and workflow. The backbone will still be People, Process and
Technology. And… in that order.
It is mandatory for our teams to get a
common understanding of just how DevOps is enabled by Agile, ITSM and Lean best
practices. It is not just the tool,
automation and continuous delivery but how we go about doing this that is
key. We need to inspire and to educate
our teams for how these practices can dove tail together to enable them and
your company for success.
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