White Paper – The Impact of DevOps on Your ITIL Implementation

The question of whether ITIL® and DevOps are related is not new. People have many conflicting views on the subject: some argue that ITIL and DevOps have different mindsets, some say that they are compatible. Our view is that the two concepts are compatible and can support the mindset needed to improve IT services delivery. This white paper focuses on the impact of DevOps on IT organizations that currently work with ITIL best practices. How does DevOps impact service design, transition and operation phases, and IT processes in general?

Before we dismiss ITIL, we should remember that ITIL is a best practice. Moreover, one of the success factors of ITIL is that it is non-prescriptive. ITIL is not explicitly opposed to Agile and DevOps. The Service Design volume supports iterative and incremental design, and mentions Agile and XP. ITIL advocates continuous feedback between the phases of the ITIL Service Lifecycle. Nonetheless, the implementation of ITIL in organizations is, in many cases, suboptimal. This can be due to a lack of capabilities or tools but in many cases it is caused by a short term focus (processes don’t matter, we want results) and paying too much attention to continuity, stability and security (which prevents flexibility). Moreover,