Bridging the DevOps ITSM Divide: Accelerating Business Transformation in a Risk-Adjusted Manner Across The Enterprise
IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps represent opposite ends of the technology management spectrum -- putting into conflict those who want to move fast and drive change with those who are hard-wired to provide security, governance, and reliability.
There is a tremendous opportunity to harness the concepts of traditional ITSM to provide a solid governance baseline that allows the automation initiatives that are often associated with DevOps to run in a rigorous risk-adjusted environment.
Rather than conflicting, these two worlds are coming closer together, allowing organizations to integrate the rigor of ITSM with the speed and automation of DevOps.
For many in the industry, IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps represent opposite ends of the technology management spectrum -- putting into conflict those who want to move fast and drive change with those who are hard-wired to provide security, governance, and reliability. There is, however, a growing case for these two enterprise technology philosophies to coexist if they can align on the common goal of enhancing performance and enabling business transformation.
Integrating DevOps and ITSM is a complex concept for people to consume. When they think of the former, it conjures the idea of moving very quickly within an agile environment. But when people think of traditional ITSM, they think of the rigor of the processes and governance associated with reducing risk.
But suppose we look at those processes more closely. It may well be possible to break these two concepts down and identify areas in which both can be automated, integrated, and consumed to support modern enterprise requirements. So say Tanya Reily, associate partner with the cloud advisory practice at Kyndryl, and Donald Carr, IT strategy and optimization practice lead within the advisory and implementation services group at Kyndryl, in a joint podcast interview with BizTechReports.
Tanya Reily, Kyndryl
“There is a tremendous opportunity to harness the concepts of traditional ITSM to provide a solid governance baseline that allows the automation initiatives that are often associated with DevOps to run in a rigorous risk-adjusted environment,” says Reily.
This should be welcome news to organizations struggling to keep up with disruptive players that are unburdened by legacy systems and processes.
“ITSM and DevOps are two concepts that can easily be brought together to provide the rigor, governance, and risk control required to protect the interests of large organizations that have complex processes and infrastructures,” she says.
ITSM, explains Carr, has come a long way over the past couple of decades and has moved far beyond its legacy of three-ring binder libraries that people often remember.
Donald Carr, Kyndryl
“The reality of it is that ITSM and ITIL have continuously evolved over the past several years to enable automated development and enforcement of the protocols it was established to support. As a result, ITSM can fit quite comfortably in this new DevOps world, which moves with a great deal of agility and speed. Rather than conflicting, these two worlds are coming closer together, allowing organizations to integrate the rigor of ITSM with the speed and automation of DevOps,” says Carr.
Indeed, as the complexity of deploying new services over increasingly complicated hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures rises, the ITSM approach to change- and release-management is more relevant than ever. This is especially true as business, technical and risk landscapes become more dangerous.
“There is a lot to be gained from better understanding and measuring the impact associated with service management. When combined with automation, modern ITSM offers the opportunity to introduce and enforce codified policies that can be automatically assessed against code in development. It creates the foundation for the rapid and repeatable implementation of secure solutions,” says Reily.
Based on the codification and qualification of policies for change management, organizations can have real-time visibility into key integration points and allocate human resources and expertise to projects with a risky profile.
“Meanwhile, initiatives that are performing within acceptable parameters can move forward at pace with automated supervision and controls,” concludes Carr.
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.