I Want What You Want: DevOps and ITSM

It is a known fact that IT has been practicing navel-gazing for solutions even before the introduction of ITSM or IT service management and DevOps. However, after the birth of both these technologies, many enterprises feel that they require ITSM, as well as DevOps simultaneously.

Some might ask that how such integration is possible when both of them are so different from one another. The article tries to explain why there is a requirement of both DevOps and IT service management and how to sync them while not denying their distinctions.

How are DevOps and ITSM different from one another?

If one puts aside emotions and religion aside, ITSM and DevOps have multiple fundamental differences. However, being different does not signify that while one is right, there is something wrong with the other. While a business may have to resolve various problems, there are multiple distinct paths to get those solutions.

Thus, it is alright to have distinctions and perfectly okay to discuss, acknowledge and understand both these concepts prior to find their common grounds and where their compatibilities lie. Check out some of them below:

1. While ITSM is resource oriented (focus is more on efficiency), DevOps is flow oriented (focus is more on effectiveness)

2. ITSM is used by functional teams while DevOps uses product teams.

3. ITSM is a process-oriented approach while DevOps focuses on value stream.

4. ITSM is used by process managers contrary to DevOps that is used by software developers.

5. ITSM is bureaucratic and pathological while DevOps is generative.

Empathy matters a lot

The Operability.IO conference was held in London, UK in 2015, which had a gathering of several hundreds of software engineers and other IT professionals. A surprising but important take away from this conference was the focus on empathy between the following:

· DevOps and ITSM professionals

· Technologists & their customers

· Developers and operations

The participants also acknowledged that a major source of a problem in the IT sector is the continuous battle between the various ideological factions.

Traits of high performing companies

Many studies conducted over the last decade or so have demonstrated that any high performing organization can deliver higher shareholder value, increased staff happiness, and greater customer value. There is hardly any reason why such traits cannot be a common goal between DevOps and ITSM:

• IT managers can have a crucial role to limit burnout and promote diversity
• When DevOps initiatives are solely launched from the grass root level or exclusively by the C-level executive, their success rates are less likely.
• It is possible to achieve high performance irrespective of your apps being legacy, brownfield, or Greenfield.
• IT companies with high performance are likely to experience 60 times fewer incidents of failures. Plus, these organizations are likely to be 168 times quicker to recover from failure.

It has been observed time and again that when people belong to different teams and work from separate geographical locations, there is a human psyche of not getting along with one another. A sure shot way of ensuring that DevOps and ITSM work better together is to put the teams together physically.

Check out some of the suggestions of good practices from those organizations that have benefited from deploying DevOps:

1. Put people in the same physical place

2. Do not use any hidden areas and using a single online system

3. The same set of perks should be awarded to all employees

4. Leaders need to divide themselves by being part of different teams

It should also be noted in this context the start of the DevOps movement was done as an alternative option to the hierarchical system, which is common in various enterprises.

Interlinking DevOps and ITSM

Although there are many differences, ITSM and DevOps have something very important as a common factor – their rich collection of toolsets. The good news for everyone is that this is the time of a plethora of emerging Application Programming Interfaces that can make even disparate tools to interconnect quite easily.

For example, ITSM tools and ITSM software suites can be linked to DevOps flow engines in such a way that all stakeholders can view, as well as control and work in the field of CI or continuous integration. It is the function of the CI solution to automate the creation, integration, and implementation of software and getting it released to any kind of target environment like a staging area, production, or the developer laptop. The process is a robust one with a rich set of metrics and tools to help in making DevOps function.

Some other instances of integrations are as follows:

1. Whenever a release happens, it goes through iterations to ensure product quality during its release. The CI server tracks all these metrics that is then fed into an ITSM tool’s summary for historical tracking. Depending on certain events, appropriate tickets can also be raised.

2. The ITSM tools maintain all the approvals. Whenever a release is triggered by a user, the Continuous Integration server will confirm the authorization in consultation with the ITSM tool.

Thus, both DevOps and ITSM must and can co-exist. However, there is a requirement to stay away from premature advancing into a strange convergence which creates a different framework.