ITIL Will Smooth the Path to SOA

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December 12, 2006

ITIL Will Smooth the Path to SOA

The tried-and-true IT management formulas that worked in the past may no longer work in SOA: In the SOA world, it's not so easy for an IT manager to know what's going on or what's going wrong.

There's plenty of discussion in the industry -- and on this blogsite as well -- that service-oriented architecture differs sharply from normal IT operations because it is an enterprise-wide effort requiring enterprise direction. It's not about technology, but the business right? (Isn't that we hear in all the seminars?)

However, since SOA is founded on technology, ultimately, its day-to-day success rests in the hands of IT managers. Can standard IT management practices be applied to SOA? Or do we need a new approach to managing technology, governance, and funding models to make SOA work the way it's supposed to?

Rich Seeley, writing in SearchWebServices, raises this question, and concludes that current IT management practices need serious revisions before they're ready to function in the SOA realm. "In the SOA world, it's not so easy for an IT manager to know what's going on or in the worst-case scenario what's going wrong," Seeley writes.

Or, as Mary Johnston Turner, VP of Ovum Corp.'s Summit Analyst Firm put it: "How do I know if my end-to-end business process is working? And if it's not working, how do I figure out which one of those interconnected pieces is the culprit?"

As IT increasingly becomes responsible for managing shared services delivered and accessed across and from outside the enterprise, some experts advise adhering to the principals laid out within the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. Originally developed in the UK, ITIL has been steadily gaining converts across Europe and North America. ITIL provides a management framework for 10 discrete processes that focus on IT service support and service delivery.

A few months back, I had the opportunity to speak with Troy DuMoulin, executive consultant with Pink Elephant, a consulting company that has been promoting ITIL adoption on this side of the Atlantic. He observed that it's getting more difficult to separate business processes from IT -- in fact, they're now one in the same.

"There’s an evolutionary change in IT’s position with the business," DuMoulin related. For example, recent compliance regulations -- Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, for example -- "made a very interesting statement. They basically say that the financial results of a company and all its protection of its data is related to business processes – that makes sense, business processes produce data. But the problem is those processes were automated as IT services and systems. So what you have is no real ability to separate the business process of accounts payable from the financial system of SAP."

In essence, DuMoulin says, "There is no longer a separation between IT and business processes. For years, we thought of IT here on the left hand, and business on the right hand, and IT lobs services over the wall at the business. But there is no longer a wall."

Which brings us back to ITIL. With processes so dependent on technology, and SOA increasing that dependency, there's going to be more pressure on organizations to show that their IT departments are following standard, accepted management practices.

In fact, some proponents out there say ITIL makes SOA easier to implement. In a post last year, David Tyler did a good job of explaining the ITIL-SOA connection, complete with working examples. He observed that "in talking to companies and helping people with their SOA initiatives, I have found a common thread through out. If you have ITIL/ITSM implemented in your IT, implementing SOA is going to be much easier." Why is that? Because ITIL focuses on monitoring, reporting, and responding, which are key elements to SOA success.

But the lines between ITIL and SOA are not yet clearly understood, said Ovum's Turner, who noted that while ITIL is popular, few organizations are applying it to manage SOA. However, complex SOA implementations will need frameworks such as ITIL or Six Sigma.

"The more you rely on SOA, the more pressure that's put on traditional IT management," Turner said in the SearchWebServices article. "If you don't have a good agreement as to the composite service you want to deliver and you don't know how to measure the end-to-end performance in a way that's going to show everyone that you did your job, it's going to be a nightmare."

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Comments

ITIL processes can be applied to SOA but some of the processes will have to evolve with future version of the ITSM best practices.

As an example, how to ensure IT Service Continuity for SOA applications which partially rely on 3rd party's components? How do we manage Change Management with composite applications which also contains external services? How to ensure Availabilty of services? How to manage Release Management if we do not have SLA's with these 3rd parties, etc.. These are just example when sophisticated SOA applications have been deployed.

Regarding the monitoring of Business Processes, I would simply say that there are on the market solutions which allow to find out where isssues are. BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) solutions often associated to BPMs (Business Process Management Suites) monitor such processes. Some solutions have APIs which allow to connect to System Management platforms such as Tivoli, BMC, or CA, and allow to identify if something is going wrong has warnings appears on dashboards. Most of the time this as nothing to do with ITIL as a Business Process is not a Service. BSM solutions allow to monitor IT Services but are based on other types of views not Business Processes.

Posted by: Serge Thorn at December 20, 2006 06:05 AM