ITIL vs DevOps - Round 1

I get very often the question of how much ITIL and DevOps are competing or eliminating each other. The last time I got this question at the DASA DevOps Fundamentals training last week. An interesting discussion unfolded and the result was unambiguous. ITIL and DevOps complement and support each other. This is true already for ITIL v3 and even more for ITIL 4. There are a lot of reasons. I would like to mention the one about the IT organization. That is another question I receive very often. How to Build DevOps IT Organizations?

When building the DevOps organization, you need to take into account three pieces of information. First of all, we need to know who the customer is. Secondly, we need to know what technology should be in place to be able to meet its needs. And thirdly, we need to map knowledge we have to the technologies. We can do all this from scratch. We will have a lot of work to do and probably will not do it for the first time. But ITIL has the solution for it for a long time. It's called a service catalog.

The service catalog is a "database" that contains information about the IT services provided or offered to the customer. What information will be there, of course, depends on the company. This is not so important. What is important, however, is that there are two catalogs according to ITIL. First of all, it is a catalog of end-to-end services as perceived by the customer. Secondly, it is a catalog of support services from which end-to-end services are composed. And here we get into trouble. Most companies that have created a service catalog have the second one. It depends only on information from IT. Just walk around the departments and ask what they actually do. And the catalog is brought into the world. Beautiful confirmation of Conway's law. But to put together the first one (end-to-end), the company must have a process map. At least in some simple form. This allows us to put support services into logical units that make sense and support specific processes in the company.

When we have a catalog, we can look at how it works. The service owner is responsible for service and communicates, on the one hand, with the customer and, on the other hand, "purchases" individual support services from internal or external providers. Well, and around such a service owner, it is possible to gradually build the team of technicians needed to ensure the operation and development of the service. And if it is not just a one-off initiative and the project becomes an "endless" project, the temporary project team can be declared permanent and we have the DevOps team. A team in which people know each other, can work together and know what their job is. This is a good starting point. At the same time, the service owner has become the product owner how we understand it in agile methodologies or directly from DevOps. However, if there is no end-to-end catalog of services, we will not have a clear definition of the customer or service owner, so we cannot build the DevOps team around. We will have to create the service catalog first. And we're back at ITIL.