Is ITSM / ITIL Going to Get Run Over by CloudComputing? Yes, If Gets in the Way

There's a lot of discussion / questions going on about the relationship between ITSM / ITIL and cloud computing.  At some level, cloud computing is nothing but IT; of course ITSM will play a big role ... no? 

Yes, but there are also big differences. And there's a great need to begin to understand those differences. To understand what changes, what remains the same, what gets emphasized, and what gets diminished.

Two examples: Change Management and Service Catalog.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Management

The singular focus on Change Management CAB as the ONE process to add stuff to the infrastructure is either irrelevant in cloud computing or has to be vastly changed, automated and and made policy driven. Heck, there's a request process now in ITIL v3.

It cannot remain the same because in the cloud servers come and go.  The speed of configuration and deployment needs to be much faster than a once a week meeting can handle.

And by the way, moving those to be pre-approved changes is a nice semantic pirouette that solves nothing for an infrastructure team under pressure to adopt virtualization and a cloud computing operating model.

We will have change management, but a huge number will now need to be standard requests off a catalog that go directly provisioning and lifecycle management, and not change management.

The other case is the service catalog. 

I'm seeing great interest from infrastructure teams trying to create self-service provisioning that goes directly to the cloud. They are defining packages, processes, trying to define their standards, etc. 

On the other side of the company, I see ITSM team still thinking a static document is the catalog and struggling with service definitions.

So there's this conflict brewing between the infrastructure group that is in hurry to adopt a cloud operating model and the ITSM group that is only focused on process. There's a good chance the ITSM group will get run over if it gets in the way.

The Cloud Operating Model is a tremendous opportunity for ITSM groups, but only if they can speak the language of cloud. And I'm not seeing that happening. 

Comments

[Prashant Bhardwaj]

Incident and Problem Management would be two more examples! Isn't it?

With your components not being consistent and sharing resources and moving around much too quickly, resolving incidents or identifying where the real issue was and fixing it permanently would be a challenge!

Or do I not understand it correctly?

[Matt Craig]

I don't really see a conflict between cloud computing and a Service Catalog. Ideally the concept of services in the catalog should be driven by the value to the customer that those services provide, not by the "current mechanism" of provision. This perspective enables you to modify the means of service provision (e.g. within the cloud), while maintaining or enhancing the value proposition.