Introduction

I had a chance to speak at the Middle East conference organized by IIRME on ITSM (www.iirme.ae/itsm) . One of the topics covered was link between ITSM and SOA. This was given to me to explain in detail to the audience. Unfortunately except for the author for Service design book Collin Rudd (ITIL v3) - I dont think there was anyone who would have greatly appreciated the thought behind SOA and ITSM.

My own thoughts on this are not driven by practical experience on implementing ITIL but more from the perspective of SOA practitioner and commonsense management of the same. I have been a system admin and DBA in previous life and have seen some ITIL v2 implementations. I do admit to lecturing service delivery on what it means to have processes etc. in large outsourcing assignments etc - but I do claim to be a SOA practitioner. In my current capacity as Chief Architect of a large Dubai based conglomerate, I do get involved in service delivery initiatives.

Before doing the talk, I had a chance to review what was published by vendors - IBM, BMC, HP as well on blogsphere - as well as a chance to recap on what Sharon Taylor the chief architect of ITIL v3 had to speak on Business IT alignment (heard her last year). Also had put in a few SOA based systems in production and felt the heat of missing linkages of ancient practices of ITIL/ITSM being applied to SOA products. It has been interesting - so I thought let me summarize my observations and practical experiences in a now nearly inactive blog and make sure that this is somehow heard enough.