The new mantra in SOA Management
'SOA has created unexpected complexity' what caught my attention and reading through the article I hit upon another unexpected term -
‘The Ovum survey found a high correlation between a business' level of satisfaction with SOA and their commitment to managing IT as a set of services.’
Surprised! services being tagged with IT, services being abstracted to such a large extent (as my thoughts were channelized only on to SOA)... I continued reading and among examples was what I found - ITIL. So it was about ITIL, a framework and set of best practices to be followed for IT management and operations.
Interestingly both ITIL and SOA both happen to build on top of notion of services, but used in different contexts.
Managing IT through a set of services - ITIL
Managing capability/functionality through a set of services - SOA
On a cautionary note this could bring some confusion about terminology (esp. 'service') if SOA management is being realized following ITIL processes and guidelines. Another good note about this is from ZapFlash.
A lot is being discussed on bonding and drawing parallels between ITIL and SOA (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3). In a recent conversation with Infosys experts, Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink mentions -
"On one hand services developed under ITIL should be able to be represented in a Service Oriented manner, leveraging the abstraction, loose coupling, and composability capabilities of SOA for meeting ITIL needs."
Similar to ITIL, there other frameworks like ISO/IEC 17799, COSO, COBIT, NIST that defines necessary procedures and practices, of which we had explored the possibilities of using COBIT in one of our research papers (accepted at SCC 2005, need to have IEEE access).
Similar to ITIL the COBIT framework identifies broad management functioning areas (domains) like planning and organization, acquisition and implementation, delivery and support, monitoring etc. These domains are then mapped to processes and further identify control objectives for each of these processes.
Interestingly we are seeing more and more such standards, frameworks defined by conglomerated experts being agumented (if not really adopted but still discussed in detail) under the umbrella of adoption of services.
Comments
Nice try on the service definitions. Did you know that there does not exist a pithy definition for the whole of the service industry?
There are many reasons why. Some of which appear in your definitions. They read well at first glance but quickly break down in practice.
There is good news however. It appears the new version of ITIL is providing a definition that applies to SOA and ITIL, and considers services as they should be.
Posted by: Dool | February 1, 2007 12:04 AM