ITIL Foundations Training - Day 2

So I've figured out a few things about ITIL so far. There is a function called Service Desk that is a single point of contact for all tactical IT needs. There is a group of processes called Service Response primarily responsible for Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, and Release Management. There is a group of what I consider second level ITIL processes called Service Delivery. These services include Service Level, Financial, Availability, Capacity, and IT Service Continuity Management. Both the function of Service Desk and the processes around Service Response and Service Delivery sit firmly on top of data contained in a configuration management data base CMDB. From the Enterprise Architecture (EA) side of things I'm really excited about how applications can be designed to plug directly into the Service Response side. Application architects need to look closely at ITIL and determine how you can introduce non-functional requirements into your application for the benefit of the entire IT operation. Sometimes this is integrating things like QuickCounters in your applications, sometimes it might be using robust error handling and logging capabilities to create incidents in the Service Desk. There is a control side of me that really looks at financial management and would like to get my head around what it costs to provide IT services to one group over another. I think you could claim in our organization we spend three times more on one group than we do on any other. Being able to back that up with numbers could get you the leverage you need when budget times come around.

I'm not sure how much I'm going to get into ITIL at this point. I see myself primarily focused in on release management and how that overlays with the environment and deployment disciplines in RUP. I do see a significant value in having a CMDB track changes to the development environments and being able to compare the state of a test environment against the state of the test and production environments.