Evolving Standards for IT Service Management

In this paper we describe standards and widely adopted best practices
that facilitate the deployment of information technology service
management (ITSM). We cover the Information Technology Infrastructure
Library (ITIL) framework of best practices for delivering information
technology (IT) services. As part of ITIL we discuss the central role
played by the configuration management database (CMDB). Then we
describe the CMDB federation specification, an emerging standard for
federating data repositories in support of a CMDB. We discuss two
standards for representing management data and constraints on those
data: the Service Modeling Language (SML) and the Solution Deployment
Descriptor (SDD). Finally, we describe how related but incompatible
Web services standards are being unified into a consistent set of
standards. A comprehensive approach to ITSM leverages standards for
information, processes, and services so that people and technology
can interact effectively and efficiently. As such, standards are
essential elements of IT. ITIL, a set of process-based best practices
for the management of IT services, was developed in the United Kingdom
Office of Government Commerce. The International Organization for
Standardization published ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005,6 commonly known as
ISO 20000, which formalizes the ITIL best practices by establishing
certification requirements. ITSM solutions benefit greatly from using
a coherent and robust process framework such as ITIL. ITIL defines
processes that enable IT organizations to efficiently and reliably
manage services and to satisfy performance, availability, and cost
objectives. For example, ITIL defines a change-management process that
starts with a user's submission of a request for change (RFC) and
includes the steps required to analyze the change and plan its
implementation so as to avoid unacceptable impact to other services
and to ensure that all changes are properly authorized. The
configuration-management-database (CMDB) federation specification
is an emerging standard describing how management data repositories
can interact with each other to appear to external clients as a
federated CMDB and how clients may access this data. The CMDB federation
specification defines the interfaces to combine data from multiple
sources into a single view based on reconciling resource identities
or relating management data or both. For example, multiple management
tools may manage the same resource, each assigning an identity to the
resource. The Service Modeling Language (SML) is an emerging standard
that specifies extensions to Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema
to describe IT resources and their interrelationships. A companion
specification, SML Interchange Format (SML-IF), describes how to
represent an SML model in a standard way for interchange. Use of SML
and SML-IF helps to integrate management tools and processes, even
though their underlying technologies differ significantly. Decoupling
the implementations gives IT organizations more flexibility to choose
components that offer the best solution without sacrificing the
integration and consistency goals in ITSM implementations. The SDD10
is an emerging standard from OASIS for representing installable
software packages and their configuration, dependency, and life-cycle
information. This information is used to automate manual tasks in the
deployment of software solutions.