How DevOps and ITSM Can Compliment Each Other (Expert Panel Discussion)

ITSM is dying, DevOps is replacing it. That’s the old; out with the old, in with the new. But what we’ve seen, over the last two and a half, three years, is that there is a place where these come together for the good of IT and humanity.

Rob, you’ve kind of led a lot of that charge, right? You also were a skeptic of DevOps.

You know, and that whole Ops after it’s live still tends to get lost. But, you know, as Cherry puts it, there’s less emphasis that’s talked about. It sort of dies away a bit, doesn’t it?

And the service management people going, “All these free-range cowboys, they’re dangerous,” that was me in the early days.

And I think that’s probably what’s trending now, is that there’s a recognition that you still need to manage change, right? You still need to do a lot of what you did. And to address something that Rob just said, you’re right, you know the original DevOps approach was, you press the button, it goes into production, and then you start again. And it was like, what happens life after deployment? And that’s I think trending a little bit now as well.

But certainly, a recognition that part of the maturation of DevOps is understanding ‘okay, look, we’ve got this CICD thing, not down perfect, but I think we’ve got our heads wrapped around it, right? We need to wrap our heads around what happens post-deployment.’ And to wrap our heads around post-deployment to just discount twenty years of ITIL and ITSM, and to throw the baby out with the bathwater is a little bit ridiculous.

Right? And I think that’s part of the maturity. That’s a mature way of saying, “Oh, they’re not mutually exclusive. Leverage, learn, learn how they go together.” And I think that’s why, frankly, all three of you presented here at DOES to standing room only.

We can produce really well now.

ITIL numbers are down. People taking ITIL exams, I think we’d all agree. You know, we’ll probably see a spike with the next version of ITIL but a lot of that will be a sort of a momentary spike of people moving up. So, unfortunately, DevOps is appreciating ITIL just as ITIL seems to be coming down.

But will this kind of rapprochement between DevOps and ITIL see a renaissance perhaps of ITIL and ITSM as it blends in.

So, you’ve got adaptive labs and, you’ve got the snafu catchers, you’ve got SRE coming out of Google, you’ve got these amazing new ways, new lenses on the same reality. But they’re deconstructing serious management and reinventing it through, almost a naïve way, they’re almost coming with no prior eye and then saying, “What does it look like?” Applying DevOps agile principles. If that gets absorbed well into ITIL, and if they’re good at learning from those things incorporating it, then there could really be a rebirth of ITIL. But if ITIL just sort of, refreshes version 3, then it’s not going to work.

So it’s how agile they make ITIL, really.

I think though that when you start, you mentioned SRE, and I think what’s interesting about SRE, think about why DevOps became interesting. It was something new, it was something innovative, it was a different approach for a modern age, right? Really not that different. It’s about release, it’s really about build, test, deploy, something that comes out of scrum and takes it into go faster, shift left, all of that.

But it was new and it was cool, and it’s a very, very different, very modern approach. I think one of the reasons that we’re seeing an increased interest in Ops is largely because of SRE, that we’re starting to see surface level objectives, you know, everybody’s talking about surface level objectives where in ITIL we’ve been talking about surface level agreements and operational agreements for a long time.

You know, you’re talking about error budgets, you’re talking about incident commanders, you know, you’re looking at a lot of kind of saying the same thing but in a newer and modern way. And that’s resonating very much with the DevOps community.

Hopefully, we’ll start to resonate with the ITIL community. And again, nothing wrong with ITIL, nothing with ITIL 4, nothing wrong with ITIL 3, but it’s taking all of that and mirroring it into IT. And that’s our big problem is, we like to label things.

Second of all, there is automation. It’s an engineering approach, which we haven’t taken before.

But most importantly, I think this is missed, if you look at the guidance for SRE, 50% of your time is spent reducing your toil, right? Your manual effort, whatever. The other 50% is you’re supposed to be learning something new. You’re supposed to be thinking about the future. You’re supposed to be spending and if it works, then your job now becomes innovative, because you’re now charged with doing something cool and you’re given the time, again in a perfect environment, you’re given time to be able to do that.

Now again, let’s bring in ITIL. Take SRE, marry ITIL, in a much more AGILE way, all of the good stuff is in there.

You know? And it didn’t have that humanity to it in the books. I know, I mean the authors will be right on me on that one, and say, “Oh, well there’s this bit about particle change in here and there’s this bit about teaming in here.” And it did address it at times, but they just had a very clinical feel to them as a book.

And I think that those are the people that, you know, I mean there’ll always be some of them, but by and large they fall by the wayside.

I like what Cherry said about, if we really look at, you know, having a baby versus raising a baby and supporting a baby, that’s a really great analogy because it shows you that during that period of gestation, right, there is a very creative aspect to it. Afterward, you’re like, “Okay, how do I feed them?”

There’s a lot of neuroses, where you’re afraid to do it wrong, and I think it’s probably more systemic in Ops than it is in Dev.

But guys, believe it or not, our half hour went so quickly. But, it’s a conversation we’ll continue, right? As we continue to eagerly await this ITIL 4. We’ll see how ITSM continues to integrate in here, and we’ll see, I think they continue maturation with their Ops.