By Donna Knapp and Jeff Jensen Let’s answer the obvious question first. What is a service management office (SMO)? ITIL® describes an SMO as a “group or department that functions as a center of excellence for service management, ensuring continual development and the consistent application of management practices across an organization.” So given that service management is a “set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services”, it is the SMO that helps the organization to develop these capabilities. A SMO can be formalized and have significant authority to drive service management in the organization, or it can be less-formal teams focused on continual development of the organization’s management practices. In some organizations, the SMO provides a management structure for the various practice/process owners and managers to report into. This also allows for a roll-up of enterprise metrics and reporting, and in some cases provides...

ITIL is not in conflict with DevOps, ITIL supports DevOps with a solid foundation by providing an up to date an accurate configuration of our IT infrastructure. This, in turn, supports the ability to accurately carry out the detection of issues and underlying problems and deliver collaborative, permanent solutions to operational deviations. Further, it engages the Second Way by “shortening and amplifying the feedback loop” to development.  Historically most IT organizations structure their incident, problem and change processes within a very confined view, typically utilizing these processes from an operational perspective and only marginally engaging them at the design stage of the lifecycle.   ITIL should and can be adapted to DevOps practices to proactively define when incidents and problems arise while still in the design phase of the lifecycle.  This means engaging both software development and infrastructure design in a way that allows us to capture these de...