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05.31.07
ITSM & SOA
 By
Charles Betz
The relationship between IT Service Management and Service Oriented Architecture keeps bubbling up to the surface.
It is a gold mine of confusion for senior IT executives, whose infrastructure and engineering leadership is talking to them about "Service Management" while their enterprise architecture braintrust goes on about "Business Services" and related SOA terminology.
You can do this Google search and find various platitudes that "if you are good with ITSM that will help you with SOA" and similar non-provable generalities. Serge Thorn has written some better stuff. It's notable to me that both ITSM skeptics and SOA skeptics (e.g. Rocky Lhotka, Jeremy Miller) have emerged.
Regardless of the overloading of that hapless word "Service," the distinct history behind the two usages is relatively clear. The genesis of ITSM is found in the success of the ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery volumes, two volumes that have had a primarily operational audience and interpretation. (Notice that I do not say they are operational in intent - it is clear the authors had more in mind.) Think large British mainframe service bureau, circa 1992.
SOA, on the other hand, is rooted in the history of software development, with origins traceable to re-usable transactions in mainframe environments, and an entire subsequent history involving developments such as the emergence of object orientation, component based development (e.g. CORBA and COM/DCOM), and the standardization of the IETF specs and the realization that a URL could be seen as simply a (slightly clunky) function call.
But, inevitably due to the common term "service," the question keeps coming up: what is the relationship? Distinct origins do not imply a distinct destiny. So, where are the two today? Can we discern any commonalities, or intractable clashes?
Those of you who follow my work may have seen the conceptual IT data model I've proposed both here and in my book. In attempting to standardize terminology, I was faced with the question of whether an ITSM "service" might in fact be identical to an SOA "service." As usual, it all depends.
The definition of exactly what constitutes an ITSM "service" is still unclear. There has been a fair amount of interest in service catalogs and such, but the examples are still very inconsistent. ITIL v2's example of a Service Catalog is primarily an application portfolio, with examples such as Payroll System and Customer Database. (Internet and Intranet are also included.) Clearly, monolithic "applications" at this level run counter to much of the SOA thinking, in which finer grained "services" are emphasized, and the larger grained applications are seen as legacy.
On the SOA side, there is a line of argument that emphasizes that SOA must not be confused with Web services or any particular technical implementation; instead, it is an overall architectural "style" emphasizing loose coupling, interoperability, platform independence, and business motivation traceability.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT
Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service
Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.
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