Monday, November 12, 2007

architecture patterns and IT service management

While researching for patterns mentioned in v3, I stumbled upon this book titled "Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children " over here.

v3's Service strategy discusses about patterns in services' resources' requirements. This puts architecture patterns in the driving seat.

Surprisingly enough, Prof Krishnan (CMU fame) and myself were planning to work on something in this direction with Mellon Bank for Sourcing services. Having such patterns back from the service providers can help clients to retain the knowledge and to a certain degree, control on their architecture.

Personally, I think that based on industry, definition of IT service management may blur or become accentuated. For instance, in the financial services space, it is less efficient if one differentiates between a business service and IT service. I feel that the whole part is a business service and IT service is so embedded in it that the IT folks cannot live in isolation in most of the cases. Of course, there are certain functions in which they can be siloed out and made to function. For instance, infrastructure. However, in case of other IT services - they are all integrated to the business services tightly. This puts another most debated question in front of us - shouldn't ITIL name be expanded to have IT Service Management rather than having the term Infrastructure in it? Shanon Taylor, architect of v3, is working in that direction.

Finally, IT Service Management will evolve to become a subset of Business Service Management - which has been around since a while now. I am not trying to nominalize the value that ITIL v3 brings - I am just expressing that it is an old wine in a new bottle :P

2 comments:

Neerab said...

Heyy Manik,
Coincidently i came across your blog... very interesting .... lot of information ...

I am also a MISM student ...in the fall 07 batch ...

trendwhizo said...

thank you - glad to be of help.