ITILizing SOA: Latest release of best practices has SOA written all over it

The latest release of IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, has SOA written all over it.

ITIL is a set of best practices intended to standardize the way IT services are delivered to organizations across the globe, through continuous improvement. So it's only natural that ITIL would start embedding SOA methodologies.

In a new update on ITIL developments, Rich Seeley over at SearchSOA details how the new version 3 of ITIL focuses on management of services, making it particularly valuable for architects and developers working on SOA projects.

Rich quotes Forrester's Evelyn Hubbert, who played up the SOA-ness of the new ITIL spec. "With the services focus of ITIL v3 it is destined to become more prominent in the SOA world." Version 3 focuses on the management of IT services across the enterprise, versus as "a silo of IT." Hubbard also said that ITIL now emphasizes "making IT a business partner by providing services to the organization -- rather than merely providing technology and components to support the business."

Hubbert, who wrote a report on the new ITIL spec, noted that it now covers best practices that include replacing legacy code with services, and deploying repeatable services that can help reduce application development and maintenance costs.

"This will be great for cost reduction of folks who are maintaining old COBOL or C code everywhere," she said. "We also have a better structure of our application and reduced complexity of performance management. So the folks in service operation are impacted by this and then the service transition team can work on leveraging and really producing an agile IT when reusing specific designs from the existing code base. The SOA IT folks will gain in scalability as well."