The Centrality Question
It was not long ago, i remember, when the discussions around ITIL i would have with customers would be around where to draw the process boundaries. For e.g. where does change end and release begin? how do you distinguish the differences between the role of the release manager and the configuration manager for deployment of large IT rollouts and so on? One was always left with a very uneasy sense of enveloping process bureaucracy at the end of such discussions. The business requirements seemed to be somewhere lost under such weighty discussions.
The most creditable aspect of ITIL v3 seems to have been to bring out the forefront a new services focus. Emphasis has been made on the fact that strategy, definition and design of services are as important as the definition of the processes in a service management program.
The trend in terms of closer alignment with the business now seems to have moved from the department/empire focus of the 1990's to the process focus of the 200x's and is now moving to the services-era with an increased adoption into V3. One of my favoured representations of the shift below
That gets us to the centrality question. First there was the technology-centric implementation. Then came the process-centric operations. Moving into an services-centric framework, one cant help but wonder when are we going to get to the business-centric IT days. Or perhaps that is the topic of ITIL V4 :-)
