With all the recent talk (and press) around SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) as well as how many billions of $ are going to be spent by IT organizations on SOA-based initiatives, I can’t help but wonder what impact this bow-wave of activity will have on ITIL-related initiatives. Or will there be any impact at all?

Is this coming “wave” good news for ITIL and ITIL-related projects? Does it mean a shift in focus for many IT Organizations? After some analysis, I think the answer is pretty clear.

The increasing focus on SOA does not mean the demise of ITIL or a decrease in focus around ITIL-based initiatives. On the contrary, SOA-based initiatives only increases the need for the type of efficiency and control that ITIL seeks to implement.

All it takes is a quick look at some of the guiding principles defining SOA to better understand this point. These core SOA principles include:

• Reuse, granularity, modularity, componentization, and interoperability
• Compliance to standards (both common and industry-specific)
• Services identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking

Bottom line, I think what SOA seeks to achieve and leverage is directly in line with core ITIL processes. What’s more, in order for SOA initiatives to be successful, strong core infrastructure operations (like those targeted by ITIL) are a necessity. Organizations who have invested in ITIL-based initiatives to improve core operations will find themselves in a much better position to support SOA initiatives. Those that have not may indeed find themselves unable to support the increased demands SOA places on IT (not a good place to be).

What do you think? Do you see the dependencies between SOA and ITIL that I see? Do you agree that SOA (because it inherently increases the complexity of IT) will only drive organizations towards stronger infrastructure operations and controls- and thus more towards ITIL? Let me know…

Joe

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