ITIL and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management.

It provides a framework for the governance of IT, the ‘service wrap’, and focuses on the continual measurement and improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a customer perspective.

This focus is a major factor in ITIL’s worldwide success and has contributed to its prolific usage and to the key benefits obtained by those organizations deploying the techniques and processes throughout their organizations.

• Some of these benefits include:
• increased user and customer satisfaction with IT services
• improved service availability, directly leading to increased business profits and revenue
• financial savings from reduced rework, lost time, improved resource management and usage
• improved time to market for new products and services
• Improved decision making and optimized risk.

It was originally developed in the late 1980s by Britain’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now known as the Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Rather than a rigid set of rules, ITIL provides a framework that companies can adapt to meet their own needs.

Organizations need not implement every process, just those that make sense and fit into the way the organization wants to do business in the future. Some processes may be abandoned later when post-implementation reviews show limited value, while others may be implemented as gaps are uncovered or needs change.

ITIL breaks down IT functions into discrete, full-function components that span the enterprise, called services.

These services have been designed in a building block manner so they can be provisioned easily either internally or through the use of an external service provider. In each case, best practices for the delivery of the service are identified and they are addressed at three different levels:

• Strategic - Long term goals of the particular service and high level activities needed to accomplish them.
• Tactical - Specific processes that guide the tasks and activities needed to perform and provision the service.
• Operational - Actual execution of the processes to provide the service to the customer and end users.Successful completion of the Operational tasks means that Strategic goals are accomplished within the expected time frames.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a style of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. The basic principles of service-oriented architecture are independent of vendors, products and technologies.[1] A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online.

A service has four properties according to one of many definitions of SOA:[2]

• It logically represents a business activity with a specified outcome.
• It is self-contained.
• It is a black box for its consumers.
• It may consist of other underlying services.[3]

Different services can be used in conjunction to provide the functionality of a large software application.[4] So far, the definition could be a definition of modular programming in the 1970s. Service-oriented architecture is less about how to modularize an application, and more about how to compose an application by integrating distributed, separately-maintained and deployed software components. It is enabled by technologies and standards that make it easier for components to communicate and cooperate over a network, especially an IP network.