One of the great sticking points for DevOps in large organisations is finding a reconciliation between IT Service Management (ITIL®) and the DevOps community. The hot zone for conflicting world-views is usually between Continuous Delivery on the one hand, and Change and/or Release Management on the other. If you don’t immediately know what I mean, then you probably don’t have this problem. There are several recent developments that are opening up this issue, making it possible to find common ground and effective ways forward.

The release of ITIL 4 has generated growing interest in reconciling the ITSM and DevOps views of the world.  In the new ITIL 4 High-velocity IT (HVIT) book, Mark Smalley and others have produced a work that many would be surprised to hear was actually part of the ITIL canon. ITIL has come a long way!

ITIL has always been a lagging indicator of industry practice. such is the nature of best practice: it needs to be generally accepted and validated before it can be documented. But boy was ITIL lagging by the time ITIL4 came out and finally embraced the agile principles.

Now a third stream that we can cross (even closer to the Ghostbusters analogy) is new ways of managing, including business agility.  This has been an area of work for Dr Vu and I for three years now, especially in Vietnam, with executives of large and small organisations.

When these three streams come together – management, ITSM, and DevOps – it creates a sweet spot where we can finally GSD (get stuff done). We can bring the three communities together to achieve better flow of value through IT.