WHICH ITIL Version for SOA?

As enterprise architects, we have many times defined IT Strategy – we seem to have Infrastructure architects who are seen as dictating terms on Operations strategy to service delivery teams. At the same time, most Operations groups are happy sitting at the back waiting for stuff to be given to them, focusing on day to day work rather than on seeing the big picture or aligning with business goals they need to be serving. A lot of this attitude stems from the fact that most service delivery folks just read two books of ITIL v2 – service support and service delivery and forgot the rest of them. For them everything starts and stops with these two books. Even service delivery processes which involve more involved thinking are usually pushed back to architects to handle.

ITIL V3 takes a major revamp as part of its focus and puts Business IT alignment and enablement back into focus revamping the structure of books in a way that no service delivery guy can back off from the strategic part, design part and continuous improvement part and just focus on operations and at best transition. Note the power of focus and the fact that certification strategy seems to make a versatilist service delivery resource rather than too focused process oriented element monitoring resource.

I heard Sharon Taylor speak last year on Business IT alignment messages in ITIL V3 – all of these sound magical to me as this is exactly what we have been talking about in successful SOA deployments. Now the service delivery guys cannot hide behind lack of established processes or cheat sheats that they have been accustomed to in the past from ITIL V2 anymore. Further sections just explore this in more detail covering individual books and showcasing how SOA and ITIL V3 co-exist.

The power of focus should not be misjudged or under-estimated – ITIL V3 is what you would want to ensure Strategic SOA deployments will work longer term for you. However make no mistake that the process definitions and tooling will evolve in ITIL V3 to handle the complexities of SOA/BPM – there is no magic pill for all remedies in the books for all types of problems seen in the deployments.