DevOps & ITIL®, both are essential in Enterprise IT

 By Made Mulia Indrajaya

In today’s world, Enterprise is adopting multiple frameworks and best practices to improve their agility and stability in providing innovative and quality services to their customer, Agile and Dev(Sec)Ops are definitely in it.

And the classic question we are always faced “is IT Service Management (ITSM) still relevant in today’s Modern Enterprise IT?”

Let’s look on one of the famous case studies in ITIL, Spotify.

The impacts of ITIL adoption in Spotify are:

• Increase work flow – more work items were completed and lead times shortened
• Reduce waste – more time was spent on the work items that created most value
• Increase in quality and work on infrastructure projects increased
• Improve relationships with and between customers – creating beneficial synergies

This is one of interesting case study of ITIL adoption, but let’s look on the real implementation of just one practice in ITIL used by Modern Enterprise IT (also in Spotify), Service Catalogue Management.

ITIL states “the purpose of the service catalogue management practice is to provide a single source of consistent information on all services and service offerings, and to ensure that it is available to the relevant audience”.

Let’s look on how Enterprise standardizes their products, develop it as a platform, and offer it as service to both external and internal, and in Spotify case, look on how they develop the service catalogue (think of menu you can order, even buffet is better) for their internal organization through Self Service Platform, called Spotify Backstage.

ITIL provides Enterprise with a holistic framework to manage their IT from strategy to operation, ensure there are no silo processes – all are work well together, then improve it with several other frameworks and approaches such as Lean, Agile & DevSecOps.

Of course, the journey can be varied in Enterprise, depends on the size of Enterprise and their industries, some might start with:

• Agile & DevSecOps, and then continue with ITIL to standardize and reduce silo processes, just like in Spotify Case.
• ITIL to design their End-to-End IT processes, and then improve the agility by adopting Lean Agile & DevSecOps.

Large Enterprises even adding Enterprise PMO layer on top to help them with Enterprise standardization; Project Manager and PMO is totally different, I know some people are allergic to project manager term when it comes to Agile and can blindly think it’s the same. And some are adopting Bi-Modal approach to achieve efficiency and agility at the same time.

There is no single framework can provide us with everything, and there is no “one size fits all strategies”, so start where you are, and then adopt multiple frameworks based on your objective, and continuously improve.

So let’s start and keep improving with both, because you need them at the end.