Is ITIL Still Relevant?

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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