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What Is ITIL?

ITIL stands for “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”. It is an online library full of publications about how to make your IT run as smoothly as possible. It is an excellent resource for every company trying to improve its IT department.

At its core, ITIL is a set of guidelines that help a company provide the best IT service possible. They are purposefully malleable guidelines so that each business can customize these guidelines to fit their own company. Because these guidelines are written to be adapted, it can be hard to understand exactly what ITIL is and what it wants you to do.

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Adaptive Change Management: A DevOps Approach to Change Management

Change management is another example of an ITIL-based process which can be significantly improved by the application of DevOps practices. Change management is often implemented in ways which fly in the face of key principles of DevOps. Traditional implementations put multiple layers of approval in place for every change, inserting significant bureaucracy and gates which almost guarantee longer release cycles and delays in getting value to the customer. This fundamentally contradicts the DevOps emphasis of short release cycles and the rapid delivery of value to customers. 

However, there can be little argument that tracking changes in a technical environment can be highly valuable. Especially in large environments where many different changes are occurring at the same time, it is critical to have visibility into what is changing and how those changes might impact one another and, ultimately, the end customer. By bringing DevOps principles to bear on change management we can ensure we are tracking and managing changes while enabling speed and agility. 

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A DevOps Approach to Incident Management Means You Can Still Innovate With ITIL

Collaboration for Incident Management

It is not true that ITIL disallows innovation and that DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are like oil and water. ITIL is a framework from which you can take or leave portions you like and, in fact, this framework provides many useful paradigms for DevOps implementations.

There’s actually lots in common between ITIL and DevOps. ITIL is a set of detailed practices which provides a set of process frameworks. DevOps is primarily a culture of collaboration so there is no reason you cannot have a process framework integrate very well with a culture of collaboration.