ITIL and DevOps - Mutually exclusive or Complementary?

I have witnessed a great amount of fine print being wasted writing the obituary of ITIL, so to speak and to hail DevOps as all conquering, the silver bullet, the panacea for IT etc. etc. All this led me to think, are these practices really the north and south poles and never the twain shall meet or are they after all not so different in what they focus on?

The Convergence

ITIL and DevOps are best practice frameworks, both of them target to make IT efficient, responsive and responsible for business outcomes.

Both of these frameworks espouse continual improvement and foster a culture of getting better every time and learning from mistakes circa PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act)

Both of them focus on better collaboration among teams and functions, that is why there are processes in ITIL which share a common dictionary and feed to and from one another. I know ITIL has often been wrongly accused of creating bureaucratic organisational silos but this is as further from truth as can be. I will try to qualify this statement later in the article.

Risk management is inherent to both these paradigms, they attempt to minimise the risk and ensure changes are implemented smoothly and with minimum business impact.

The Divergence?

Why then, do some proponents suggest that ITIL and DevOps are at loggerheads and one has to give way to the other in the new world order?

ITIL inhibits speed somewhat (not my view) by going through the rigmarole - for example by having changes assessed by some group (CAB) which sometimes has no idea whatsoever what the changes is all about whereas DevOps is all about getting things done swiftly, if the code has been integrated and the build has passed the automated tests, one doesn't have to wait until next week for the CAB to convene and approve the change for production deployment, also the person(s) authorising the deployment knows the code and understands what it does.

In my view, it's not what ITIL has suggested or recommended but how a particular ITIL process has been understood and 'implemented', that causes delays and introduces bureaucracy. ITIL doesn't mention a weekly CAB. Well, one is free to do a daily CAB if need be, ITIL doesn't say all changes need to be brought to and discussed at the CAB, making low risk and repetitive changes standard changes is what ITIL suggests, DevOps achieves this through automation of build, configuration, testing and deployment so what was a high risk manual activity earlier becomes low risk now.

ITIL creates silos by creating different processes and process teams (again not my view). In my view, processes were created in ITIL so there are clearly defined inputs and outputs of each process with the idea of one process consuming the output of the other process, then utilising and interacting with the other process to achieve outcomes. For example if an incident fix requires something to be changed, change management process kicks in and does the change and then problem management process investigates the root cause and tries to fix it. Does it mean all this is not done in the DevOps world? Of course it is done, albeit may be not by different teams.

Does every organisation and every department within an organisation need to work at hyper-fast speeds? I guess not, that is why bi-modal IT is so much required.

In concluding, I would say very succinctly what has been said umpteen number of times - 'adapt and adopt', as mostly is the case, we just adopt and fail to adapt :)