The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of pre-defined processes and common practices (I try to avoid the word “best practice” when talking about ITIL) for the IT service management (ITSM).
When I talk with customers about ITIL, they often complain about the overhead of ITSM processes, that were designed according to ITIL. I already wrote about this in one of my previous blog posts (Is lean ITSM a myth?
When I talk with companies about IT processes and IT service management (ITSM), ITIL seems to be the de facto standard for ITSM. Implementing an ITSM without using ITIL, seems to be impossible. I have many customers that have implemented ITIL-based ITSM processes and most of them had enormous trouble during the implementation and/ or operation.
Lean ITSM and ITIL? Companies mainly have three problems during the implementation and/ or operation of ITIL processes:
Today a tweet from Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) has caught my attention:
Don't waste money on automation without first looking at your processes. https://t.co/PWeFDbyQkb pic.twitter.com/7RvhmvS6GQ
— Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) May 8, 2016 https://twitter.com/CTOAdvisor/status/729141035692068865
Keith wrote a nice blog post and I really recommend to read it. His point is, that automation enables business agility.
The point of automation is to enable business agility. Business agility isn’t achieved by automating inefficient processes. The start of an IT automation project begins by examining existing processes and eliminating inefficiency.
I really like the idea behind Kanban. I wrote about it in 2014 (Organize your work with Kanban), and I even wrote my bachelor thesis about it (Industrialisierung der ITIL Service Operation Phase unter Verwendung von Lean Management // Industrialization of the ITIL Service Operation phase with Lean Management).
The word “kanban” comes from the japanese and can be translated with “signboard”, “card” or “billboard”. Kanban is a scheduling system and helps to implement the pull principle in a lean manufacturing system.
Complexity, in general usage, tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement.
Wikipedia
Following this disambiguation, and assuming that “many” means N > 2, all systems with at least two or more components are complex. But that would be an exaggeration, right?
Why is information technology complex? Most systems in information technology (IT) are complex. Almost everything we are working with, consists of two or more components, regardless if it is hardware or software.
Automation is essential to reduce friction and to streamline operational processes. It’s indispensable when it comes to the automation of manual, error-prone and frequently repeated tasks in a cloud or enterprise environment. Automation is the key to IT industrialization. Azure Automation is used to automate operational processes withing Microsoft Azure.
Automation account The very first thing you have to create is an Automation account. You can have multiple Automation accounts per subscription.
Before you can manage Azure services with Azure Automation, you need to authenticate the Automation account against a subscription. This authentication process is part of each runbook. There are two different ways to authenticate against an Azure subscription:
Active Directory user Certificate If you want to use an Active Directory account, you have to create a credential asset in the Automation account and provide username and password for that Active Directory account.
If you want to see highly automated and efficient production processes, you have to leave the information technology (IT). Look at the the automotive industry, or generally a industry with a high amount on industrial production. What is the output of IT? It is an IT service. What is a service? A for the customer convenient usable combination of knowledge, technology and processes. The following is the definition for a IT service used in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3:
