ITIL, DevOps, Whatever – The Labels Don’t Matter
If you think you’re enlightened because you’re now a DevOps shop (or have always been), there’s news for: Whether you’re ITIL or DevOps, Agile or Lean, what you call your team won’t protect you from failure.
There are many labels for how IT functions. The latest one is DevOps, with its predecessor (several times since iterated on) being ITIL.
If you’re new to IT and unfamiliar with ITIL, it was introduced in the 1980s as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and was comprised of IT best practices for a mainframe system. To avoid confusion as well as evolve with the modern IT environment, ITIL is now simply referred to as just "ITIL," and is defined as a library of information or a set of best practices for managing IT services. ITIL is often associated with ITSM, which stands for Information Technology Service Management. ITIL is the best practices, ITSM is the discipline.
ITIL has been through several iterations and was most recently updated in 2011. However, a new update to ITIL is slated to publish this year and is expected to address ITIL as a complement to DevOps environments among other things.
While the truest description of ITIL is a set of best practices, many IT teams took the five ITIL books (now six) and turned them into a rigid framework. ITIL is also often associated with the word bureaucracy, a slow, laborious process of approvals. This is where strict DevOps fans cringe because DevOps doesn’t have a definition and definitely isn’t a framework.
There has been a lot of debate about whether ITIL is still relevant in a world consumed by software, or if it should be called something else, but experts believe that ITIL still holds relevancy even in a technology environment drastically different from the 1980s.
“As long as organizations rely on IT to run the business, and as long as they care about their customers, ITIL will stay relevant, -- but things do need to change,” says Kaimar Karu, international consultancy director for Mindbridge, and former Head of ITSM at AXELOS.
One of the issues that surround the ITIL relevancy debate, says Karu, is a collection of misconceptions about ITIL and how it is meant to function within an IT team.
"ITIL is not about processes. It’s about customer value, flexibility, and continual improvement -- whatever the actual processes look like,” says Karu.
He also says that many IT departments didn’t evolve their IT strategy with the changing times, which can lead to a false perception of what ITIL is today.
"They were likely heads down trying to get their daily work done, and sometimes busy 'implementing ITIL', to notice the updates to the framework," says Karu, adding that many people still reference the previous versions of ITIL that had a stronger emphasis on processes, compared to the customer-centric approach from the past 11 years.
In interviewing IT experts about this topic I couldn’t help but notice how similar the misinterpretations of ITIL sounded like the issues that plague many DevOps teams today. Trying to make DevOps a framework for application and software development, where individuals in charge of different stages of the value stream become hyper-focused on their own metrics and can’t see the customer through the process.
Damon Edwards, founder of Rundeck Inc. summed up this thought nicely: