Aligning ITIL V3 Service Design with TOGAF 9
ITIL V3 is structured in 5 modules, one of them being The Service Design book. This book refers to technology-related activities (requirements engineering; data/information management and application management). It also covers some of the practicalities: functional roles analysis; activity analysis; roles/responsibilities; and even service design and management tools. Service Design processes are important because they provide organizations with information that will affect their decisions on designing solutions for new or changed services-
Service Design has five aspects:
- Design of the service solutions
- Design of the Service Portfolio (and other supporting systems)
- Design of the technology architectures and management systems
- Design of the processes
- Design of the measurement systems, methods and metrics
Section 3.6.3 on page 35, provides a specific context for the terms “architecture” and “system” which is well aligned with ISO/IEC 42010:2007 definition used by TOGAF 9.
”Architecture” is defined as:
“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.”
”System ” in this definition is used in the most general, not necessarily IT, sense:
“A collection of components organized to accomplish a specific function or set of functions.“
”architectural design” as :
“The development and maintenance of IT policies, strategies, architectures, designs, documents, plans and processes for the deployment and subsequent operation and improvement of appropriate IT services and solutions throughout an organization.”
In ITIL V3, IT policies and strategies are defined by senior management during the Service Strategy phase of the service lifecycle. These policies may be also be reused during the Preliminary Phase of TOGAF 9. The Preliminary Phase allows us to establish the business context, customize TOGAF, define architecture principles, and establish the governance structure. Architectural Principles are general rules and guidelines that support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission. These principles should be the source for the creation of IT policies.
Service Architects and Designers will need to consider several resources such as (budgets, infrastructures, applications, information, and people) and capabilities (management, organization, processes, knowledge, and people) of the organization defined by TOGAF 9. This will have to be coordinated with the business requirements which may have been collected from a Business Scenario (TOGAF). Using inputs from the business and Service Strategy in ITIL V3, the design needs to take into consideration, people, processes, products, and partners. Also designers will have to take into consideration, the vision, mission, goals, and objectives in order to translate them into critical success factors, key performance indicators, metrics and measurements.
Documents in ITIL V3 may be considered as being artifacts in TOGAF 9. Artifacts consist of plans, contracts (Architecture contracts or other forms of contracts), job descriptions, organizational structures, process workflows, procedures, instructions, configuration, diagrams, catalogs, lists, and databases among many other document types.
One of the major difficulties for the designer will be to sort through this documentation and remove that which is obsolete, duplicated, incomplete, or erroneous. TOGAF with its Architecture repository may also help to store documents related to IT Service Management. You may also think of combining a CMDB with an Architecture Repository…but that would be another topic to discuss.
Although plans should be considered as documents, it is important to identify and sift through the myriads of plans that are in use in the organization. Plans may be produced by different lines of business including IT, issued by business planning committees, PMO, etc. Some of the difficulties will include gathering them (business plans, IT plans, operational plans, contingency plans, financial plans.etc.) , making sense of them and more importantly, making sure they are aligned. For these reasons, the TOGAF Migration Planning phase helps to coordinate different business areas and create a common plan.
The term architecture within ITIL V3 may be aligned with the 4 architecture domains from TOGAF:
- Business Architecture: for Business, organization and enterprise
- Data Architecture: for data and information, databases
- Application Architecture: for applications
- Technology Architecture: for hardware (desktops, mobile devices, servers, and mainframes), network, telephony and software
Some aspects may not be covered by architecture domains such the Environment (heat, ventilation, AC, etc.), or the physical workspace including safety (this would be covered by Security Architecture considered during the ADM phases).
Services would be a combination of the four domains.
The Service Design activities and processes covers:
- Service Level Management
- Availability Management
- IT Service Continuity Management
- Supplier Management
- Information Security Management
- Capacity Management
- Service Catalogue Management
These processes can be designed when building the Technology Architecture with the Technical Reference Model (TRM).
Page 37 of the Service Design book refers to many documented practices available for designing, deploying, and operating service architecture. It lists Enterprise Architecture frameworks, one of them being TOGAF!
