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Do You Still Need ITIL and ITSM?

Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) and its subset Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) are best practices that have grown to become essential foundations of corporate IT.

In banks, insurers, energy companies, infrastructure companies and even retailers, IT change control processes are implemented in ITIL and ITSM. Often however these best practices are elements of overlapping standards and their subsiduaries such as COBIT and CMMI.

These frameworks and their derivative parts are used to provide control mechanisms to ensure that only the changes that are known, approved and necessary are made to IT infrastructure and also critical software systems.

ITIL originally comes from the 80s. Based on practices that have been around since the 1950s. This from Wiki:

Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations designed to standardise IT management practices across government functions, built around a process model-based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle.[3]

While standards are good, IT infrastructure has changed immeasurably since the 80s. IT Service Management hasn’t really moved on.

All businesses wants to know that their IT is safe, secure and reliable – all of the time. Providing customers the best service while ensuring security, compliance and reliability must be paramount.

How can rigorous standards apply throughout our IT service provision without getting in the way of swift delivery? This will be the challenge from 2023 onwards.

There is more pressure to deliver software infrastructure and applications than ever. Customers demand faster and higher quality software releases. Rigid frameworks, Change Advisory Boards, meetings: these themselves do not provide any assurance or agility. In fact the more people involved, the worse the experience for everyone involved – particularly the customer.

So how can you deliver quality, faster and more compliant software without involving more people? The answer – better quality assurance through more relevant testing, better automation to ensure continuous integration, clearer standards agreed and baked into your CI/CD pipelines.

Need to help making sense of all that? Give me a call.





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