ITIL versus DevOps

There is a common interpretation that Service Management, and therefore Application Management, is only responsible for support and/or maintenance work. However, there is an increasingly obvious overlap between these two concepts – which has been made more obvious as DevOps matures as both an operating model and a movement.

DevOps is still a very difficult operating model to implement, especially in large traditional organizations that traditionally prefer a clear split between development and support. But there are a growing number of progressive people and organizations who purposefully amalgamate development and support. This, as you may guess, can sometimes result in a profoundly positive effect or a spectacular failure!

Whether your organization chooses traditional Application Management or DevOps, the value of ITIL is in achieving a focus on fulfilling the needs of the business. It achieves this by ensuring that both IT and non-IT people, who you may be managing now, use the same terminology together, so that they can communicate and work better together.

DevOps is a much over-used buzzword. Since the term is still an evolving and maturing practice, it's only natural that there are multiple different interpretations and variations to the phrase.

To explain the more mainstream version of what DevOps is, I want you to take a look at Figure 4.3, which is a favorite of mine and which succinctly explains the core activities and responsibilities of DevOps:

To finish off our look into ITIL, I want to explain to you, in the next section, the three key terms, event management, incident management, and problem management, that you need to know in order to understand this model.