ITIL Foundations Training - Day 1

I went to my first day of ITIL foundations training as part of attempting to bridge the gap between AppDev and our operations folks. We've got a custom implementation of RUP that I'm really excited about, and I'm not sure how AppDev really works within the ITIL process.

I can't say that I really know the answer, but from an Enterprise Architect perspective I'm beginning to get really excited about the prospect of a CMDB and seeing how to lay out for folks the impact of change.

Up until now, things have made a lot of sense to me. You've got your basic web site calling a few SOA like web services, tied into back end databases and external providers, some over VPN and some using the WS-* stuff. Most of the time we use enteprise library June 2005, but sometimes we use the January 2006 stuff if we are using the new Common logging libraries that drop into our Enterprise Exception handling process tied into ProIT and our new TFS server. I mean how hard can this be?

I mean I've got pictures, deployment diagrams, and even provide operations with a set of MSI files that contain embedded configuration settings. In the event of a disaster all you have to do is go to the file share and double-click.

Maybe it's a training issue and our operations folks just don't get how to run Microsoft operating systems and .NET web applications. Maybe they just don't care.

Well as it turns out it's probably not a training issue at all. And when push comes to shove these guys (gender neutral guys of course) probably would go as far as I would for the organization.

Maybe the stuff I'm packaging up and sending over abstacts them from the issues they are likely to deal with in production.

There is one key take away for me at this training. When AppDev shoves things over the wall to operations I think we'll need to be more considerate of integrating our systems with our ITIL Service Desk and Issue management system, especially around filtering and avoiding a DOS attack on the Service Desk.